Situational Analysis of Engineering Practice

STS inspired studies of engineering work practices provide new material for a richer understanding of engineering culture. However, the specific and strictly situated focus of many of these studies threatens to limit discussions of engineering practices to departmental and discrete institutional settings. This micro perspective potentially overlooks the inherent and overarching normativities that inform engineering culture. Furthermore, the micro perspective has difficulties in transgressing institutional boundaries in order to investigate the dynamics of cultural reproduction in engineering.
The paper will propose a research agenda that – inspired by George Marcus’ multi-sited ethnographic methodology (Marcus 1998) and Adele Clarke’s situational analysis (Clarke 2005) – analyze (and contrasts) engineering practices in diverse settings (e.g. engineering education and engineering work) in order to uncover the material-discursive transformations in these practices. Thus the research agenda intends to suspend the micro-macro dichotomy by making the situation the ultimate unit and point of departure of analysis. The paper will outline the research design of my studies and elaborate on my considerations for choice of a ‘theory/methods package’ (Star 1989) for my research. This elaboration will foreground my epistemological and ontological assumptions alongside my concrete practices and methods in going about my research. The paper will thus outline how my research has progressed through the use of ethnographic field studies, interviews and discourse analysis of texts.