The three articles in this issue examine transformations in engineering work practices. From different perspectives, they explore how engineering work practices are being transformed (or not) when actors bring in ideas and practices from other professional traditions and knowledge domains. Through empirical studies of contemporary, situated engineering work practices, the authors investigate how engineering work is performed by professional engineers, engineers with ‘alternative’ educational backgrounds, and even non-engineers. The three studies deal with types of activities that are commonly considered as engineering work, but in all three cases the actors consider doing engineering slightly differently – or ‘by other means’.
In Making Room in Engineering Design Practices Rikke Premer Petersen and Anders Buch explore the challenges that occur when a new approach to engineering design enters an existing ecology of professional practices in a workplace. Conducted as an ethnographic study in the Volvo Car Group the authors follow a small group of newcomers in Volvo’s User Experience Competence Center. They explore how the group members are trying to challenge what counts as ‘real engineering’, or what is recognized as part of engineering expertise. The group members attempt to transform engineering professionalism to become more holistic in order to accommodate the social aspects of technology use.
The second article, Innovation Science: Between Models and Machines by Joakim Juhl, investigates how a group of theoretical physicists develop mathematical models of process machinery in order to aid the implementation of more intelligent control models – a job normally considered as engineering. However, the ‘applied tendency’ of contemporary scientific practices, and the policy drive to make scientific research more applicable, challenges standard ways of doing engineering. Juhl discusses how the physicists construed their work and set up success criteria that departed from engineers’ preferred ways of solving problems. He characterizes their approach as Innovation Science – a disciplinary scientific approach that aims to produce scientific knowledge for commercial ends.
Finally, Anders Buch’s article Ideas of Holistic Engineering Meet Engineering Work Practices discusses how a new ‘breed’ of holistically educated engineers and other professionals who adopt a holistic approach fare in substantive engineering work practices. The article outlines an empirical study of a small team of professionals who engage in holistic engineering work practices in an engineering consultancy company to develop a climate account. His study draws attention to the obstacles faced by the team members as they try to promote their holistic approach to engineering work.
The authors do not side with specific views on what engineering (really) is, or who the engineers (really) are. Instead, they investigate how work practices are reenacted and/or transformed by actors who engage in engineering work. At the same time, these investigations are of importance to questions about the demarcation of engineering. The studies illuminate pertinent dynamics in contemporary engineering work practices that bear on issues relating to identity, power, privilege, exclusion, convention and innovation in engineering professionalism. This special issue thus supplies empirical case material exploring how the disciplinary boundaries of the engineering profession are contested, appropriated, and sedimented in everyday work life.