I am fascinated by the idea of “the underlying sociological and cultural factors” that go into the way a sociocultural group engages in the task of engineering (within this context: the scientific approach to problem-solving).
I realize this is a poor explanation, but an example of the phenomenon should be able to clarify what I attempt to describe. The underlying structure of the thought process behind how the Russian conception of war resulted in divergent, yet ultimately superior tank design. The cultural influence on the way tools that fill a universal need are themselves constructed. Like how western saws cut on the pushstroke, but eastern ones on the pullstroke. the saw is almost the same, and exists to serve a shared need for a tool. yet the simplest thing diverges completely.
This isn’t cultural as much as material.
The saw example is most glaring. Plenty of “””eastern””” saws cut on a push, we just only have familiarity with Japanese joinery tools because that’s the type of handmade woodworking that survived the fascist era and ww2.
So it’s not that there’s a cultural difference, but a difference in our perception. There’s also a real difference in the development of the industry that created and used those tools in those places. (Japanese saws that cut on the pull are made of thinner steel and so cut on the pull out of necessity as opposed to for some other reason. As for why they are thin, look to the relative value of often imported steel at the times those tools were made to find out why!)