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Abstract
Using data from interviews and field observations, this article argues that engineering needs to be understood as a much broader human social performance than traditional narratives that focus just on design and technical problem-solving. The article proposes a model of practice based on observations from all the main engineering disciplines and diverse settings in Australia and South Asia. Observations presented in the article reveal that engineers not only relegate social aspects of their work to a peripheral status but also many critical technical aspects like design checking that are omitted from prevailing narratives. The article argues that the foundation of engineering practice is distributed expertise enacted through social interactions between people: engineering relies on harnessing the knowledge, expertise and skills carried by many people, much of it implicit and unwritten knowledge. Therefore social interactions lie at the core of engineering practice. The article argues for relocating engineering studies from the curricular margins to the core of engineering teaching and research and opens new ways to resolve contested issues in engineering education.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Sabbia Tilli and his students for their contributions and discussions leading to this article. Vinay Domal, David Mehrevari, Adrian Han, Markus Peterman, Tim Maddern, and Sanji Sivabalan contributed additional data and field study reports. Some of the work was supported by the WA Energy Research Alliance, the CRC for Integrated Engineering Asset Management, and the Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics. The author is deeply indebted to all the engineers who have participated anonymously in this study. Finally, the author is grateful for extensive, helpful and encouraging comments from the editors and reviewers that significantly improved the article.
Notes
1There is a remarkable similarity between our observations and those reported in Brown et al., Distributed Expertise in the Classroom, 1993, 188–194. Several other informative discussions of distributed cognition in education appear in the same book. Distributed cognition in a naval context was also discussed in Roberts, “Some Characteristics of One Type of High Reliability Organisation,” 1990; and Roberts, Stout, and Halpern, “Decision Dynamics in to High Reliability Military Organisations,” 1994.
2Faulkner, “Nuts and Bolts and People,” 2007; Lagesen and Sorensen, “Walking the Line?,” 2009.
3Youngman et al., Analysing Jobs, 1978, 7–9.
4E.g. Bailyn and Lynch, “Engineering as a Life-Long Career,” 1983; Meiksins and Smith, Engineering Labour, 1996; Suchman, “Organising Alignment,” 2000.
5E.g. Kilduff, Funk, and Mehra, “Engineering Identity in a Japanese Factory,” 1997; Lam, “Engineers, Management and Work Organization,” 1996; Lam, “Embedded Firms, Embedded Knowledge,” 1997; Lynn, “Engineers and Engineering in the US and Japan,” 2002; McCormick, Engineers in Japan and Britain, 2000.
6E.g. Whalley and Barley, “Technical Work in the Division of Labour,” 1997, 34; Zussman, Mechanics of the Middle Class, 1985, 28.
7E.g. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers, 1994; Eckert et al., “What Designers Think We Need to Know About their Processes,” 2004; Kidder, Soul of a New Machine, 1981; Kunda, Engineering Culture, 1992; Leonardi and Bailey, “Transformational Technologies and the Creation of New Work Practices,” 2008; Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know it, 1990; Vinck and Blanco, Everyday Engineering, 2003, 13–28; Wilde, “The Skills and Practices of Engineering Designers Now and in the Future,” 1983.
8E.g. Kogan and Muller, “Ethnographic Study of Collaborative Knowledge Work,” 2006; Perlow, “The Time Famine,” 1999; Sonnentag, Niessen, and Volmer, “Expertise in Software Design,” 2006.
9E.g. Faulkner, “Nuts and Bolts and People,” 2007; Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures,” 2009; Korte, Sheppard, and Jordan, “Early Engineering Work Experiences,” 2008; Yun, “Technical Workers in a Newly Industrialising Economy,” 1991.
10E.g. Barley and Bechky, “In the Backrooms of Science,” 1994; Barley and Orr, “Between Craft and Science,” 1997; Bechky, “Sharing Meaning across Occupational Communities,” 2003; Horning, “Engineering the Performance,” 2004; Mason, “Production Supervisors in Britain, Germany, and the United States,” 2000; Orr, Talking About Machines, 1996; Zabusky and Barley, “Redefining Success,” 1996.
11Some readers might see engineering studies as a niche in a cathedral of social science studies. As an engineer I see this differently: a more pragmatic approach in which engineering studies illuminates the core of engineering practice, as I argue in this paper. Engineering studies scholars, therefore, can argue for the attention of engineers and their educators as a primary constituency in which social science offers pertinent insights.
12Barley, “What We Know (and Mostly Don't Know) About Technical Work,” 2005.
13Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies For?” 2009, 69.
14Lagesen and Sorensen, “Walking the Line?” 2009, 132, also works such as Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, 1995.
15E.g. Bennell, “Engineering Skills and Development,” 1986; Coelho, “Of Engineers, Rationalities and Rule,” 2004; Domal and Trevelyan, “Comparing Engineering Practice in South Asia with Australia,” 2008; Kirmani and Baum, “The Consulting Profession in Developing Countries,” 1992.
16Sheppard et al., “What Is Engineering Practice?” 2006.
17Based on extensive qualitative analysis at a single institution: Pawley, “Universalized Narratives,” 2009.
18Maillardet, “What Outcome Is Engineering Education Trying to Achieve?” 2004.
19American Society of Civil Engineers, Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century, 2008, 50.
20E.g. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye, 1992; Petroski, To Engineer Is Human, 1985.
21A useful and detailed example is provided by Zussman, Mechanics of the Middle Class, 1985.
22Huberman and Miles, The Qualitative Researcher's Companion, 2002; Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis, 1994; Patton, Qualitative Evaluation and Research, 1990; Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists, 1987.
23Useful data came from accounts such as Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers, 1994; Darr, “Technical Labour in an Engineering Boutique,” 2000; Orr, Talking About Machines, 1996; Vinck, Everyday Engineering, 2003; Winch and Kelsey, “What Do Construction Project Planners Do?” 2005.
24Elaborated in Trevelyan, “Technical Coordination in Engineering Practice,” 2007.
25Note that any coding scheme depends on the approach taken by the investigator: Button and Sharrock, “Occasioned Practices in the Work of Software Engineers,” 1994; Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967.
26Tilli and Trevelyan, “Longitudinal Study of Australian Engineering Graduates,” 2008.
27Trevelyan, “Engineering Education Requires a Better Model of Engineering Practice,” 2009, 5.
28Work in progress by Bill Williams at Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal.
29Fictitious place and project names have been used in some quotations.
30Health, Environment, and Safety.
31Mehravari, “Systematic Checking in Engineering Design,” 2007, 39–40.
32Ashforth and Mael, “Social Identity Theory and the Organization,” 1989, 25.
33Evans and Gabriel, “Performing Engineering,” 2009, suggested the term “performance.” Petroski, To Engineer Is Human, 1985, demanded “human” to be tightly associated with engineering.
34Jonassen, Strobel, and Lee, “Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering,” 2006, 144; Korte, Sheppard, and Jordan, “A Qualitative Study of Early Work Experiences of Recent Graduates in Engineering,” 2008, 9–11.
35Ericsson, “The Acquisition of Expert Performance as Problem Solving,” 2003.
36In a wide ranging discussion Collins and Evans referred to this as interactive expertise, though they seem to reserve the term for STS researchers, Collins and Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies,” 2002, 252.
37See also, for example, Darr, “Technical Labour in an Engineering Boutique,” 2000, 208.
38Sonnentag, Niessen, and Volmer, “Expertise in Software Design,” 2006, 380.
39Appropriate structural elements described in Gainsburg, Rodriguez-Lluesma, and Bailey, “A ‘Knowledge Profile’ of an Engineering Occupation,” 2010; also in other disciplines, Sonnentag, Niessen, and Volmer, “Expertise in Software Design,” 2006, 377.
40Often referred to as a project phase gate decision process, Cooper, Winning at New Products, 1993, 109.
41E.g. “The Engineering Method” in Dowling et al., Engineering Your Future, 2009, Ch. 3.
42Younger engineers need up to an hour of explicit help and guidance daily. See Bailey and Barley, “Teaching–Learning Ecologies,” In review.
43A common explanation for the role of communication in engineering, usually from the engineer to others, e.g. “The purpose of communication is to convey information.” Galloway, The 21st Century Engineer, 2008, 26.
44Brown et al., “Distributed Expertise in the Classroom,” 1993.