Situational Analysis and Engineering Work Practices

Studies of work practices of scientists and engineers inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS) provide new material for a richer understanding of expert cultures and expert work practices. However, the specific and strictly situated focus of many of these studies threatens to limit discussions of work practices to departmental and discrete institutional settings. This micro perspective potentially overlooks the inherent and overarching normativities that inform expert culture and expert work practices. Furthermore, the micro perspective has difficulties in transgressing institutional boundaries in order to investigate the dynamics of cultural reproduction in expert work practices.

The paper will propose a new research agenda that – inspired by George Marcus’ multi-sited ethnographic methodology (Marcus 1998) and Adele Clarke’s situational analysis (Clarke 2005) – analyze (and contrasts) expert work practices. Our study will focus on engineering practices in diverse settings (e.g. engineering education and engineering work) in order to uncover the material-discursive transformations in these practices. Expert work practices cannot be adequately understood by delimiting the research focus to the ‘the situated work practices’. In order to accommodate ‘matters of scale’ it is necessary to investigate expert work practices by juxtaposing different analytic methods. The research agenda intends to suspend the micro-macro dichotomy by making the situation the ultimate unit and point of departure of analysis and allowing the situation to be scalable. Likewise, it aspires to overcome the widespread dualism of ‘text’ and ‘con-text’ that pervades contemporary social science methods. We will argue that expert work practices – although reproduced and enacted in local settings – are also enactments of expert cultures that transcend narrow institutional and local bounds and reflect wider discursive-material transformations in the political economy.

Taking our point of departure in our studies of work practices situated within two Danish engineering consultancy companies the paper will observe how groups of engineers and other experts negotiate their professionalism and expertise in work situations. We set out to demonstrate how ideals about engineering professionalism play an important role in setting standards for the work practices but we also observe how rising demands for ‘efficiency’, ‘profitability’, ‘individual performance’, etc. tend to compromise traditional professional ideals and aspirations. Focusing on the mediation of actions and collaborative practices within the organizational settings we witness how ideals about ‘teamwork’ are rhetorically and discursively enacted but moulded and transformed though corporate management systems and economic rationales.

The paper will outline the research design of our studies and elaborate on our considerations for choice of a ‘theory/methods package’ (Star 1989) for our research. These elaborations will foreground our epistemological and ontological assumptions alongside our concrete practices and methods in going about our research. The paper will thus outline how our research has progressed through the use of ethnographic field studies, interviews and discourse analysis of texts.