This two-part theme issue on ‘Engineering and the Workplace’ (the current issue Vol. 3, Issue 2, and the December 2010 issue, Vol. 2, Issue 3) consists of seven empirical papers that have examined engineering work using different theoretical lenses and methods across a wide range of settings. This second edition of the theme issue contains papers that in one form or another address three significant challenges faced by engineers in early twenty-first century – increased mobility of people across the globe; transformation of established industries by new information and communication technologies (ICTs); and, concerns of climate, environment and sustainability. The studies presented here were conducted in Canada, Germany, and Norway, exemplifying the globalization not only of engineering work but of engineering studies scholarship as well.
In the first article, Marcia FriesenFootnote1 offers a study of immigrant engineers in Canada as they traverse the professional certification process. Canada relies heavily on high-skilled immigrant workers for economic and technological growth. Given its reliance on immigrant workers and its skill-based immigration policy, it has established strict codes and enforces credential recognition seriously. Immigrant engineers have to obtain professional licensing in Canada to practice as an engineer. Friesen followed 39 immigrant engineers during and after their participation in a university-based qualifications recognition program. Although this program is offered as a skills improvement course, the reality, as Friesen shows, differs. The actual acculturation of immigrants is highly dependent on acquisition of capital – human, social, linguistic, and cultural – and success in the workplace requires going beyond mere skill improvement and recognition. Friesen draws on Bourdieu's conception of capital and habitus to examine the actual process of what workers do and what they need. This paper presents us with a view on immigration of high-skilled workers, mostly engineers, which is usually missing from traditional discourse on immigration. Immigration of high technology workers is often seen as a smooth transition and their struggles get lost within the larger debate on immigration which is driven by issues relevant to lower income immigrants who are often fighting for subsistence wages.
In the second article, Mascha Will-Zocholl and Rudi SchmiedeFootnote2 present a study of the automobile industry in Germany and document the challenges faced by automotive engineers as they deal with changes that have swept the industry in the past three decades. The automotive sector has significantly changed due to the proliferation of ICTs in all areas of automotive work. This change coupled with increased globalization has resulted in frequent restructuring and considerable distribution of work across the globe. By closely examining the work of engineers, the authors found that ICT has transformed not just communication among workers but also coordination of work as ICT use is integrated across all aspects of automotive work. Work processes that were primarily material – such as building physical models – are turning digital through use of modeling and simulation software thereby changing who can work on what and from where. The authors outline six challenges faced by engineers in the firms they studied: marginalization of engineers’ technical work, which they term enucleation, autonomy of work, increasing insecurity, the issue of responsibilities, increasing complexity as well as transformations in the materiality of engineers’ work. They argue that in terms of skill development, engineers need to learn to work with increasing amounts of information as well as learn to engage fruitfully with challenges presented in global work.
In the final paper of this issue, Melhuus Hojem, Vivian A. Lagesen, and Marianne Ryghaug use the concept of assemblages as a way to characterize the work of consulting engineers in Norway engaged with projects related to the environment.Footnote3 Specifically, the authors examine how these engineers enacted environmental concerns. The authors begin by synthesizing three theoretical assemblages that represent the practices of consulting engineers – engineers’ project work, professional ethics, and business strategies. They compare the actual enactments of engineers against these assemblages. They observed instance of all three theoretical assemblages in their empirical analysis. They found that consulting engineering companies had a tendency to get caught in project-based thinking, what they term as the ‘tyranny of projects.’ Overall, their findings suggest that consulting engineers were unable to enact environmental concerns fully because of other actors in the project assemblage – such as institutional constraints. The informants acknowledged their lack of ability to influence projects in a more environmentally friendly direction. One critical contribution of this paper is identification of the link between the institutional and regulatory environment in which engineering work is undertaken and how structural factors affect engineering practice.
Some lessons and avenues for future research
Overall, the articles comprising the theme issue show that studies of the engineering workplace can offer deep and diverse insights into the changing nature of engineering. provides an overview of the articles included in this theme issue and outlines the salient elements of each article. A common component of the articles is a consistent use of field studies and data collection using recognized qualitative and ethnographic methods. Most articles also draw on practice-based accounts thereby providing descriptive and interpretive accounts of engineering work, and all authors have tried to develop new knowledge or test prior knowledge. The articles further highlight the usefulness of this methodology for uncovering tacit and situated aspects of engineering work.Footnote4 also depicts the diversity of viewpoints, research sites, geography, and authorship, present in the issues. It is heartening to see the range of theories and analytical frameworks adopted by the authors and the geographic spread of field sites and author institutions. Through this diversity, some common lessons emerge for preparing future engineers and for conducting future research on the engineering workplace.
Table 1. Overview of theme issue articles.
One important theme that emerges is learning and knowledge sharing in the engineering workplace.Footnote6 TrevelyanFootnote7 outlines the role of distributed expertise and argues that success in the engineering workplace depends on knowledge and expertise across a range of engineers using multiple artifacts. He identifies that engineers’ relationship to knowledge – both social and technical – is not straightforward and engineers relegate both to the sideline as they make the distributed enterprise work. Gainsburg et al.Footnote8 go a step further and create a knowledge profile of structural engineers to argue that practice-based knowledge is paramount to solving engineering problems and not only support but can also lead to more theoretical knowledge. This practice-based knowledge is necessarily a conglomeration of working with others and collaboration and communicating with them. This view is supported by Anderson et al.Footnote9 who show that in their practices engineers consider communication as the key factor that determines knowledge sharing and learning. These findings have several implications for engineering education not the least of which is an issue that has been a concern for decades – engineering science versus pragmatic applicable engineering. As Gainsburg et al. and Anderson et al. show, a path from practical work towards engineering sciences might be a better model to engage and retain engineering students. Not all classroom-based engineering science knowledge is irrelevant, hardly so, but the right balance of practice and science is important to attract and retain students with long-term loyalty to engineering work. The identity as practitioner should be encouraged and built upon, not shredded by engineering science and science requirements.
The other prominent theme that emerges from these articles is that proliferation of ICTs and globalization of work is having a significant impact on engineering work. These changes not only have implications for how to train engineers but go to the very heart of engineering identity with consequences for what it means to be an engineer. Will-Zocholl et al. caution that increasing use of ICT coupled with globalization has made it imperative for engineers to devote significant time on coordinating their tasks and this has reached a state where engineers feel as if ‘real’ technical work is all being done by machines and they are relegated primarily to dealing with coordination issues. This observation raises the question of who are engineers and what do engineers actually do. The articles respond to this question in different ways. Friesen's article accurately and precisely captures the nuances of how globalization affects engineering work by explicating how immigrant engineers not only acquire skills but also capital and slowly undergo what can only be seen as a transformation in their identity. Hojem et al. highlight the constraints under which engineers operate and how those constraints shape their behavior, and enactment of practices, and the consequences of actions for serious issues such as environment. In spite of their intentions to be environment friendly, the realities of their practice prevent them from enacting their concerns thereby creating a contradiction. Anderson et al. show that these issues are common across engineering firms irrespective of their size and nature of work.
Future research needs to examine more closely how engineers traverse the changes they encounter in the engineering workplace and overcome the boundaries that often appear because of mismatch in their training and requirements of their work; in particular, how they leverage their agency and their structures to co-create novel work practices.Footnote10 Knowledge sharing in the workplace is another topic that still remains largely unexplored. The relationship between workplace learning and engineering learning in the classroom is tenuous at best. Newcomer participation in the engineering workplace in particular largely remains unexamined. Future studies also need to fully capture the transformation from physical materiality to digital materiality as digital records continue to become a larger part of engineering work. Digitization increases accessibility but often hides the context around the creation and use of artifacts making it hard to interpret and apply information. Digitization has also made it easier to generate new models and alternatives making selection harder. Finally, engineering work is being transformed by new models of organizing that have appeared on the horizon. Open organizing models, such as open source software, are slowly permeating into other areas of engineering such as automotive design.Footnote11 This has implications not only for workplace innovation but also for engineering learning and education as this growth suggests that it is now possible to create authentic settings where engineering practice and engineering learning co-exist.
From its inception until its publication, the journey for this special issue has taken over two years. I want to express my sincere gratitude for the hard work put into the two issues by Gary Downey, Juan Lucena, and Kacey Beddoes. Gary and Kacey in particular did an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting to ensure that the papers were critically and constructively reviewed and made it into print on time. I will also like to thank the authors for their willingness to participate in this endeavor and for firmly placing the engineering workplace on the list of issues relevant for engineering studies. Finally, thanks to Matt Wisnioski for his feedback on this editorial.
Notes
1Friesen, Engineering Studies, Citation2011.
2Will-Zocholl and Schmiede, Engineering Studies, Citation2011.
3Hojem et al., Engineering Studies, Citation2011.
4Johri and Olds, Situated Engineering Learning, Citation2011.
5Campagnolo and Fele, From Specifications to Specific Vagueness, Citation2010.
6John, Engineering Studies, 2010.
7Trevelyan, Reconstructing Engineering from Practice, Citation2011.
8Gainsburg et al., A Knowledge Profile of an Engineering Occupation, Citation2010.
9Anderson et al., Understanding Engineering Work and Identity, Citation2010.
10Johri, Sociomaterial Bricolage, Citation2011.
11Johri, Open Organizing, Citation2010.
References
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- Friesen , Marcia . 2011 . Immigrants' Integration and Career Development in the Professional Engineering Workplace in the Context of Social and Cultural Capital . Engineering Studies , 3 ( 2 )
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