CHAPTER 7
Professional Engineering Work
Reed Stevens, Aditya Johri, and Kevin O’Connor
Introduction
The focus of our chapter is on current
research-based understandings of profes-
sional engineering work. We argue for the
relevance of these understandings to engi-
neering education. We will also argue, as
others have as well (Barley, 2004; Trevelyan,
2007, 2010; Vinck, 2003), that research on
professional engineering work is too sparse.
Therefore a good part of this chapter is
oriented in a programmatic, agenda setting
direction.
From the perspective of engineering edu-
cation, the sparseness of research on pro-
fessional engineering work is puzzling for a
number of reasons. First, engineering edu-
cation is often reorganized against the back-
drop of claims about what professional engi-
neering work is now or will be in the
future. Without trustworthy and specific
representations of engineering work prac-
tice and of the dispositions, skills, and iden-
tity orientations of professional engineers,
how are engineering educators to know
whether engineering education is preparing
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engineering students to be successful, cre-
ative, or impactful engineers? A promi-
nent consensus report from the National
Academy of Engineering highlights a “dis-
connect between engineers in practice and
engineers in academe” (National Academy
of Engineering [NAE], 2005, pp. 20–21). The
report stated that “the great majority of
engineering faculty, for example, have no
industry experience. Industry representa-
tives point to this disconnect as the rea-
son that engineering students are not ade-
quately prepared, in their view, to enter
today’s workforce” (National Academy of
Engineering [NAE], 2005, pp. 20–21). It is
important that a focus on “preparation” of
future engineers not be tied to an agenda
that solely emphasizes what professional
engineering “needs” and economic compet-
itiveness. It also is possible to organize
an engineering educational system to pre-
pare recent graduates to be change agents
and participants in new social movements
within engineering work practice. However,
in either case, concrete images of engineer-
ing work are critical resources for rethinking
119
 120 cambridge handbook of engineering education research
engineering education and making empiri-
cally based assessments of progress.
The lack of concrete and trustworthy
images of professional engineering quite nat-
urally extends to engineering students as
well. Students often have vague images
of professional engineering work, and the
images they do have are strongly colored by
the experiences in their educational careers
that allowed them to navigate into and
through engineering education – that being
exceptional past performance in textbook,
problem set, and test-based mathematics
and science courses. As a result, students
often ignore, discount, or simply do not
see images of engineering that emphasize
its nontechnical, noncalculative sides and its
non-individual aspects (Stevens, O’Connor,
& Garrison, 2005; Stevens, O’Connor, Gar-
rison, Jocuns, & Amos, 2008). The idea that
engineering work can be creative, collabora-
tive, and oriented toward agendas of social
good (not just financial gain) are aspirational
positions that students sometimes adopt,
but for those students for whom these are
non-negotiable core values and interests, the
absence of direct images of engineering that
support these values can be decisive for
whether even high-achieving students stay
in or leave engineering (Stevens et al., 2008).
So, more concrete images of engineering
work can be an important resource for stu-
dents themselves, as they can for institutions
of engineering education broadly.
With regard to images of engineering,
it is worth noting here that engineering –
unlike other professions such as teaching,
medicine, law, and even natural science –
is not widely represented within popu-
lar cultural media. One can easily bring
to mind television shows, films, and nov-
els that depict teachers, lawyers, doctors,
and even natural scientists. How easily can
readers bring to mind similar representa-
tions of engineers and their work on film
or television? The recent visibility of a
character on the popular television show
The Big Bang Theory is an exception that
seems to confirm the rule. And the engi-
neer, Howard Wolowitz, M. Eng., routinely
endures status-based teasing from his friends
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who have Ph.D.s and degrees in higher sta-
tus scientific fields.
A third clear reason to have detailed
research-based images of professional engi-
neering work is that even if extant studies
were sufficient in their capacity to represent
engineering as it is (which we argue they
are not), the images of these studies would
need continual updating because engineer-
ing is properly and widely understood to be
a rapidly changing form of work, under the
forces of globalization; offshoring; and new
technologies of communication, design, and
production. These multiple reasons argue
strongly that it is important to establish
what we already know and what we still
need to learn about professional engineering
work.
What We Know About Professional
Engineering Work
In this section, we review and synthesize
empirical research on professional engineer-
ing work, drawn largely from field studies,
but also from laboratory studies and surveys
that include professional engineers as sub-
jects. Every method has its strengths and
weaknesses, but field studies are the only
type of research that can tell us what engi-
neering work is like in context. Field stud-
ies are typically conducted in workplace set-
tings, and although the duration of fieldwork
varies across studies as do the types of data
captured (e.g., fieldnotes, video-recordings
of engineering work, semistructured inter-
views), most field studies have a broadly
ethnographic goal: to describe adequately
the specific qualities of work practices, to
understand and represent the meaning of
those work practices for the people being
studied, and to understand engineering work
as constitutive of unique forms of work cul-
ture and social organization.
Among the social scientists who have
taken an active research interest in engi-
neering, a number have highlighted the puz-
zling dearth of empirical descriptions of pro-
fessional engineering work (Downey and
Lucena, 2004; Trevelyan, 2010; Vinck, 2003).
 professional engineering work
The academic field that probably has given
professional engineering work the most
extended attention has been Science and
Technology Studies (STS). Bruno Latour, a
leading scholar in STS, wrote an early syn-
thetic book titled Science in Action: How to
Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Soci-
ety (1987). Despite this early programmatic
announcement that engineers would be fol-
lowed along with scientists, STS has mostly
forgotten to follow the engineers (Downey,
1989), at least in comparison to the attention
devoted to higher status natural scientists.
As Downey and Lucena put it, “In research
in science and technology studies (STS),
engineers often make cameo appearances
but rarely do they get lead roles” (Downey
& Lucena, 2004, p. 395).
When STS studies have followed engi-
neers’ work, the resulting accounts diverge
sharply from normative images of what his-
torian Rosalind Williams calls “the ideology
of engineering” (Williams, 2002), that is, the
view that engineers have a distinct technical
domain of knowledge that they can apply
rationally and in a more-or-less linear man-
ner to the solution of technical problems.
Under this ideology, the social and technical
do not mix. In strong and vivid contrast, STS
studies have established that engineering
work involves “complexity, ambiguity, and
contradictions” (Hughes, cited in Williams)
and that the social and technical are almost
inextricably tied up together in any engi-
neering project, at least in any project that is
realized successfully. STS scholar John Law
(1987) gave a name to this alternative image
of engineering work; he called it “heteroge-
neous engineering.”
Law’s idea of heterogeneous engineering
revolves around the imagery of engineers
as “system builders” (Law, 1987, p. 112) in
which any stabilized system they contribute
to building is composed of heterogeneous
elements that are both human and techno-
logical. Law’s own case study of heteroge-
neous engineering is historical and concerns
Portuguese colonial expansion in the late
1400s. Law also references Hughes’ study of
Edison through which Law makes the key
point succinctly:
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121
Edison’s problem (his reverse salient) was
simultaneously (italics added) economic
(how to supply electric lighting at a price
that would compete with gas), political (how
to persuade politicians to permit the devel-
opment of a power system), technical (how
to minimize the cost of transmitting power
by shortening lines, reducing current, and
increasing voltage), and scientific (how to
find a high-resistance incandescent bulb fil-
ament). (Law, 1987, p. 112)
A contemporary case study that offers a
“canonical example of heterogeneous engi-
neering” (Suchman, 2000, p. 314) involved a
major bridge-building project. The study’s
author, Lucfy Suchman, notes that the
design and technical practices that engi-
neers view as “the real work” of engineering
did take place in this project; however,
her analysis shows the work of “sense-
making, persuasion and accountability”
(p. 315) are as consequential for the real-
ization of the bridge project (cf. Trevelyan,
2010). These practices are equally impor-
tant parts of engineering work because of
the vast number of heterogeneous actors
(see Table 7.1) – human and nonhuman,
small and large – that must be assembled
and maintained into a stable network for
a project to be realized. The critical con-
ceptual point that undergirds the hetero-
geneous engineering perspective – as well
as the broader perspective of actor-network
theory (cf. Latour, 2005) – is that the com-
monsense dichotomy between the “tech-
nical” and “social” is unnecessary and in
fact misleading when trying to understand
how projects are realized. A recalcitrant
code reviewer or problematic environmen-
tal impact statement can threaten a project
as easily as can a tensile strength limita-
tion. Put in the idiom of Actor Network
Theory, to successfully realize an engineer-
ing project, nature and material forces will
resist and these resistances must be over-
come; the same can be said of humans and
their institutions; they resist and must be
overcome (e.g., persuaded, adequately paid,
made silent, etc.). As Suchman writes in
conclusion, “the construct of heterogeneous
engineering is meant to underscore the extent
 122 cambridge handbook of engineering education research

Table 7.1. Partial Enumeration of Relevant Actors

Federal/State County/Region City Department Other
agencies
Federal Highway Two county Board Two cities on Department Delta smelt
Administration of Supervisors north and Headquarters
(FHWA) south shores
Governor Conservation and Southtown District Harvest mouse
Development Improvement
Committee Association
State Transport Metropolitan Mayor of Toll bridges Hazardous
Improvement Transportation Northtown waste
Program (TIP) Committee
(MTC)
Environmental Impact Regional Home-owners Structures C&H Sugar
Statement (EIS) Transportation
Plan (RTP)
Federal Emergency Design Railroad
Management
Agency (FEMA)
State Historic Bridge Rights-of-way
Preservation Office Replacement
(SHPO) Project
Fish and Wildlife Utilities
Coast Guard
Army Corps

Reprinted from Suchman (2000, p. 317). This represents a partial list of human and nonhuman elements that had
to be organized and stabilized for the successful realization of the bridge-building project.

to which the work of technology construc-
tion is, to a significant degree, also the work
of organizing” (Suchman, 2000, p. 324). And
it is organizing of both the physical and the
human world.
If heterogeneous engineering represents
a broad conceptualization of professional
engineering work, what does the work itself
look like – the day-to-day practices of engi-
neers? Some of the earliest fieldwork about
professional engineering practice was con-
ducted by Bucciarelli (1988, 1994). Buccia-
relli studied “the design process” within two
engineering firms, using participant obser-
vation techniques. Consistent with a gen-
eral ethnographic stance, Bucciarelli did not
first stipulate a definition of design pro-
cess and then collect data that aligned with
that definition; instead, he constructed his
account of the design process on the basis of
how the members of the cultural groups he
studied (i.e., the professionals at the two
firms) defined and enacted design. Buccia-
relli’s study clearly establishes that “[engi-
neering] design is a social process” (Buccia-
relli, 1988, p. 161) not in some trivial sense
that it involves people working together but
rather that “[design] only exists in a collec-
tive sense” (p. 161), that it can only be seen
as a process that is distributed across differ-
ent sub-communities, which in turn requires
social and technical coordination to bring
different parts of a project’s work together.
Bucciarelli introduces the concept of an
“object world” to identify the firms’ “dif-
ferent worlds of technical specializations,
with their own dialects, systems of symbols,
metaphors and models, and craft sensitiv-
ities” (Bucciarelli, 1988, p. 162). For exam-
ple, whereas the electrical engineer’s object
world is filled with voltage potentials and
involves sketching objects like diodes, the

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 professional engineering work
mechanical engineer’s object world is pop-
ulated by beams and steel and requires an
understanding of metal machining process.
The manager’s object world is inhabited
by schedules, milestones, and critical paths.
Bucciarelli highlighted that these different
object worlds must be brought into some
kind of coordination often involving nego-
tiation among the inhabitants of different
object-worlds making a point similar to that
made by Suchman’s later study, that “orga-
nizational effort is part of designing” (Buc-
ciarelli, 1988, p. 162).
Another early study of engineering design
by Henderson (1991, 1999) described the
“visual culture” of engineering design, a cul-
ture in which sketching is the way that
engineers think and communicate and in
which sketches are objects through which
organizational actions are frequently coor-
dinated and negotiated. Engineering draw-
ings and sketches are shown to be “devices
that socially organize the workers, the work
process, and the concepts workers manipu-
late in engineering design” (Henderson, 1991,
p. 452). Henderson’s study shows that engi-
neers gathered around sketches, talked and
revised their ideas with sketches and draw-
ings at the center of their activity. She also
uses the ubiquity and centrality of sketching
and drawing (as actions) and these sketches
and drawings (as objects) to offer a critique
of a then dominant ideology that paper was
soon to be a thing of the past in engineering,
to be replaced by computer-aided design
(CAD). Because Henderson showed the
centrality of sketching and sketches and
because CAD systems of that time period
rigidly specified drawing practices and draw-
ing forms, Henderson argued that CAD
lacked the requisite flexibility needed to sup-
port the collaborative work practices of engi-
neering design.1
In another field study of civil engineers
designing roadways, Hall and Stevens (1995)
found that engineers worked with both
CAD and paper interfaces, each having their
own affordances within the work practices
and accountabilities of engineering work.
In general, however, this study concurred,
as did a later study of architectural design
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123
by Stevens (2000), with Henderson’s finding
that the work of envisioning, exploring, and
revising design alternatives was a paper-
based practice because of paper’s “flexibil-
ity” as a mobile, collaborative, and expres-
sive medium. It remains an open question,
one that has seemingly not been addressed
in a field study, whether the idea of design-
ing within the computer environment is
still more of an ideological fiction rather
than a routine fact of work practice. It
seems plausible that the current generation
of engineering designers, having grown up as
so-called “digital natives,” may have substan-
tially shifted the balance from being engi-
neers producing and iterating design ideas
on paper to doing so more fully within CAD
environments, which of course have them-
selves become more flexible and friendly
to sketching practices with touch sensitive
tables, better GUIs, and bigger screens.
Drawing on the broader thematic inter-
ests of STS, these studies of professional
engineering focused attention on the impor-
tance of documenting engineers’ represen-
tational practices (cf. Lynch & Woolgar,
1990; Greeno & Hall, 1997; Vinck, 2003) –
how people use representations to make
sense, solve problems, and to persuade and
communicate with others. One fine-grained
analysis of the representational practices of
engineering work can be found in Stevens
and Hall’s development of the concept of
“disciplined perception” (1998, cf. Stevens,
1999). Disciplined perception refers to the
learned ways that people in a discipline
see and interpret their focal phenomena –
through their tools and representations. In
focusing on these discipline-specific prac-
tices, disciplined perception is a concept
consistent with Henderson’s focus on the
visual cultures of engineering as well as Buc-
ciarelli’s focus on the distinct culturally con-
stituted object-worlds of engineering.
Using the methods of interaction analy-
sis (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990; Jordan &
Henderson, 1995) to analyze the moment-
to-moment unfolding of civil engineering
project work, Stevens and Hall’s account of
engineers’ disciplined perception also pro-
vided a way to understand how disciplined
 124 cambridge handbook of engineering education research
perception develops in practitioners. The
account analyzed interactions in which
intersubjective gaps (i.e., different ways
of seeing what representations were say-
ing) between collaborating engineers work-
ing together provided occasions for a more
experienced engineer to discipline the per-
ception of a relative newcomer. Stevens and
Hall’s account thereby articulated the inter-
actional mechanisms through which an engi-
neer might gradually “learn to see” as an
engineer, through proximal apprenticeship
with more knowledgeable others in the con-
text of daily work. This account can also
be tied to the idea of heterogeneous engi-
neering, in that the disciplined perception
of engineers involves reading a range of het-
erogeneous interests and constraints directly
from representations. For example, in this
study the authors recount how the engi-
neers provide a coordinated reading across
plans, sections, and elevations to recover
a rationale for a consequential decision to
exceed code-allowable grade on a stretch
of proposed roadway, which in turn could
avoid the financial cost and potential slow-
down of their project that would be set
in motion by a damaging environmental
impact statement. In the context of single
stretches of interaction, the technical ele-
ments (such as “cut” and “fill” and “allow-
able grade”) are intermixed with social issues
(such as satisfying budgets and environmen-
tal concerns of some project stakeholders).
This account also resonates with Suchman’s
account, which highlighted that engineers’
work is often about making persuasive
arguments to secure project interests, with
arguments assembled via embodied perfor-
mances with visual representations.
Comparing the Work of Engineering
Education and the Work of
Professional Engineering Practice
Another line of research on engineer-
ing workplaces, also relatively sparse, is
work that compares the work practices of
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undergraduate education to the work prac-
tices of professionals on the job. This com-
parative research is often conducted with
an eye toward possible programmatic impli-
cations for engineering education. Com-
parative research on problem solving in
the undergraduate curriculum and in pro-
fessional engineering work suggests that
the types of problems that are solved
and the processes of problem solving in
these different contexts differ in both sub-
stance and structure (Jonassen et al., 2006;
Stevens, Garrison, & Satwicz, 2007; Stevens
et al., 2008). Engineering problems found in
school – particularly in coursework apart
from senior capstone experiences – are orga-
nized to develop facility in solving “well-
structured” problems (Jonassen et al., 2006),
with clearly stated goals and knowable, cor-
rect solutions attainable through applica-
tion of a small, finite set of rules and
principles. This recalls a venerable dis-
tinction from Rittel and Webber (1973)
regarding “tame” (i.e., well-structured) vs.
“wicked” problems, with wicked problems
being the norm for professionals. The well-
structured problems that engineering stu-
dents learn to solve tend to be aimed toward
advancing students’ individual mastery of
concepts of engineering science (Korte,
Sheppard, & Jordan, 2008; Stevens et al.,
2008).
Trevelyan and Tilli (2007) conducted
an extensive review of different liter-
atures on engineering work, including,
among others, the technical literature
on engineering research and development,
competency standards of professional orga-
nizations within engineering, engineering
education literature, engineering manage-
ment literature, and ethnographic stud-
ies of engineering work. They concluded
that most of these literatures provide an
inadequate picture of engineering work.
They diagnosed a prevalence of prescrip-
tive claims about engineering work based
on personal experience or anecdotal evi-
dence, an undue privileging of design engi-
neering over and above other engineering
practices, a neglect of tacit aspects of work,
 professional engineering work
and a tendency by respondents to limit what
they view as “real engineering” to a narrow
range of technical aspects of their work (cf.
Faulkner, 2008 and Suchman, 2000).
These studies, along with others, point
to the promise of qualitative and ethno-
graphic research for broadening and deepen-
ing our understanding of the work practices
of engineers. There are also other research
traditions that have productively informed
an understanding of professional engineer-
ing work. Atman et al. (2007), working
within the tradition of expert-novice studies
in cognitive science, conducted a compara-
tive analysis of the problem-solving strate-
gies of students and professional engineers.
These authors showed that, in laboratory-
based simulations of engineering problem
solving, experts display not only more exten-
sive engineering science knowledge, but also
more awareness of and judgment regarding
other aspects of problem solving. This kind
of detailed analysis of problem solving can be
valuable in demonstrating that differences
between experts and novices can be under-
stood in terms of differences in organiza-
tion of knowledge and cognitive strategies.
Jonassen, Strobel, and Lee (2006) used dif-
ferent methods to make related points about
problem solving in engineering work. Based
on interview accounts of engineers’ past
problem-solving experiences, these authors
argued that workplace problems are “ill-
structured” or “wicked” (Jonassen et al.,
2006; Rittel & Webber, 1973), most often
involving vaguely defined goals and inviting
no clear solution or solution path. Work-
place problems were shaped from the out-
set by nontechnical constraints as befits a
general image of heterogeneous engineer-
ing, such that success was rarely measured
solely by technical or scientific standards but
also included such considerations such as
timeliness, budget, and customer satisfac-
tion. Workplace problems foreground the
importance of communication of technical
concepts to others, rather than individual
mastery or understanding of these concepts
(Korte et al., 2008). And they require dis-
tributed expertise to solve them (Stevens
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125
et al., 2007). As a result, judgment is a critical
aspect of problem solving by engineering
professionals (Eraut, 2000; Stevens, 1999;
Stevens et al., 2007; Vinck, 2003). Such ill-
structured problems stand in contrast to the
well-structured problems found in school,
which are characterized by clearly stated
goals and by knowable, correct solutions
attainable through application of a small,
finite set of rules and principles. And these
tend to be practiced and evaluated through
the standard forms of problem sets, quizzes,
and exams (Stevens et al., 2008), forms
that have no natural home in the prob-
lem solving practices of professional engi-
neers. Thus, both expert–novice task anal-
ysis and interview studies of simulated or
reported work practices echo the finding
of ethnographic field studies and caution
against a view of engineering work as con-
sisting primarily in “technical rationality”
or what Williams called “the ideology of
engineering.”
Trevelyan (2007, 2010) conducted a qual-
itative study that involved ethnographic
interviews supplemented by field observa-
tions with Australian and Pakistani engi-
neers. This study is noteworthy for its
delineation of ten categories of engineering
practice, including several that tend to be
neglected by more prescriptive and norma-
tive typologies. One major category of engi-
neering practice identified by Trevelyan is
what he terms “technical coordination,” that
is, “working with and influencing other peo-
ple so they conscientiously perform some
necessary work in accordance with a mutu-
ally agreed schedule” (2007, p. 191). At
least two aspects of technical coordination
are important to understanding engineer-
ing work. First, technical coordination takes
place outside of formal lines of authority.
That is, coordination practices are not sim-
ply the province of managers; rather, all
engineers seem to engage regularly in these
social processes. Second, like Atman et al.
(2007) and others, and against commonsense
views among engineers that “the social”
and “the technical” are separable (Faulkner,
2008, coordination is a hybrid of social and
 126 cambridge handbook of engineering education research
technical aspects of work, and therefore
social interaction is at the core of accom-
plished engineering practice.
This body of work that compares the
knowledge practices of engineering students
and engineering professionals is suggestive
and important, but it is also sparse and
limited in how it allows us to understand
connections and disconnections between
engineering education and professional engi-
neering work. Interview studies that focus
on accounts of past problem-solving experi-
ences (e.g., Jonassen et al., 2006) have been
valuable in pointing to some major areas
of difference between schools and work-
places. However, interviews are less than
fully sensitive to the broad range of knowl-
edge practices, especially its tacit dimen-
sions (Eraut, 2000; Polanyi, 1966), which
are largely inaccessible to reflective aware-
ness. Laboratory studies (e.g., Atman et al.,
2007) have been valuable in demonstrat-
ing that differences between experts and
novices can be understood in terms of differ-
ences in the organization of knowledge and
cognitive strategies. However, laboratory-
based expert–novice studies are limited in
their ability to represent the locally sit-
uated aspects of problem solving, includ-
ing characteristic ways in which particu-
lar workplaces (or school settings) organize
teamwork; access to and communication of
information; and the distributed, material,
and embodied properties of cognitive activ-
ities (Hall & Stevens, 1995; Hutchins, 1995;
Stevens & Hall, 1998). Ethnographic stud-
ies in undergraduate engineering education
and in engineering workplaces (O’Connor,
2001, 2003; Stevens & Hall, 1998; Stevens
et al., 2005, 2008) have been conducted to
capture these aspects of engineering prac-
tices (e.g., its embodied, material, and dis-
tributed qualities) that are easily missed in
other styles of research. However, although
they offer suggestive accounts about how
engineering education knowledge might
relate to, or fail to relate to, workplace
knowledge (O’Connor et al., 2007; Stevens
et al., 2005, 2008), these studies have not
examined directly the specific learning pro-
cesses of engineers making the transition
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from school to work. Simply put, too lit-
tle is known about how the practices of
undergraduate education are applied and
adapted in the workplace and equally lit-
tle is know about what knowledge prac-
tices from one’s engineering education expe-
rience have little or no clear use at work.
Lines of research that look directly at these
transitions from school to work are much
needed.
The Identity Dimension
Thus far we have focused our attention
largely on characterizations of engineering
work. In this section, we look at another
important dimension of professional engi-
neering – identity. If we are interested in a
full understanding of professional engineer-
ing, we must attend not just to what people
learn and know but also to who they are and
what is their place in the world among their
consociates as engineers, both within their
local professional networks and within social
life more broadly. Personal, social, and disci-
plinary identities intersect in complex ways
among professional engineers. We under-
stand identity formation as a two-sided pro-
cess in which persons identify with certain
groups (e.g., engineers) and forms of activity
(e.g., engineering) and are in turn identified
with certain groups and forms of activity by
others. “Identities” have been argued theo-
retically to result from a complex, nonde-
terministic stabilization of these two dialec-
tically related processes (Skinner, Valsiner,
& Holland, 2001).
A few key studies bear directly on iden-
tity issues among professional engineers.
In a largely historical analysis, Downey
and Lucena (2004) highlight the shaping
influence of “codes” to which engineers
responded at a particular time and in a par-
ticular place. Tracing a set of codes through
Western Europe into the U.S. context, they
argue that the historical trend has been
for engineering identities to be increasingly
shaped by the view that “progress” in engi-
neering is tied to participation in and affilia-
tion with large industrial corporations. They
 professional engineering work
argue that, especially in the period from
the Second World War to the current day,
American engineers came to see themselves
in terms of corporate metrics of progress,
namely the mass production of low-cost
consumer goods and corporate profit. In
general, they claim that “[American] engi-
neers have made embracing private indus-
try a patterned feature of their identity”
(Downey & Lucena, 2004, p. 411), something
they note is not necessarily characteristic of
other professionals in law, medicine, and
the clergy. Downey and Lucena’s perspec-
tive resonates with a more forceful claim
in David Noble’s America by Design that
American engineers in the postwar period
became a “domesticated breed” (Noble,
1977, p. 322 who “in reality served only
the dominant class in society” (Noble, 1977,
p. 324).
Research by Faulkner (2008) points direct-
ly to some identity issues for engineers who
must navigate a dominant technicist ideol-
ogy of engineering (i.e., what we have been
referring to as technical rationality) and the
reality of professional practice as heteroge-
neous engineering. Despite the fact that all
engineers do heterogeneous work and most
recognize this work (though not using the
term “heterogeneous”), there is a tendency
among engineers to define “real” engineer-
ing in terms of the technical, “nuts and
bolts,” scientific and mathematical labor,
and to locate the social aspects of hetero-
geneous engineering outside of “real” engi-
neering (cf. Trevelyan, 2010). Faulkner sug-
gests that identifying with these features of
engineering work allows engineers to main-
tain a unique identity of technical compe-
tence amidst interdisciplinary collaborations
with people both within their firms (e.g.,
managers) and outside them (e.g., archi-
tects). This may be an implicit response
to what historian of technology Rosalind
Williams calls the “expansive disintegration”
(Williams, 2002) of engineering as a distinct
and bounded form of professional knowl-
edge and competence. If, as Williams argues,
society is increasingly coming to perceive
that nearly everything involves engineer-
ing, then nothing is distinctly engineering.
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127
Faulkner’s analysis suggests further that the
distinction between the technicist and the
heterogeneous registers is a gendered one,
with the “nuts and bolts” identity being one
that men can more comfortably perform to
reconcile their dual identities as both men
and engineers. Faulkner’s study supports a
point from a related pair of studies she cites
(Robinson, 1992; Robinson & McIlwee, 1991)
that “found that men engineers often engage
in ‘ritualistic displays of hands-on techni-
cal competence’ even when the job does not
require this competence. Women engineers do
not generally participate in this ‘engineer-
ing culture,’ as they call it, and can lose
out in career terms as a result” (Faulkner,
2008).
We also can compare engineering student
identities and professional engineering iden-
tities, as we compared knowledge practices
among students and professionals. Existing
empirical work is suggestive but incomplete
about how identity formation processes in
engineering student culture might shape
transitions to engineering workplaces. There
is a plausible tension in the way a student
and a professional might understand herself
if most students’ educations are based pre-
dominantly on coming to understand engi-
neering as a form of technical rationality.
Such an understanding of engineering could
result in both direct and indirect tensions
in understandings of one’s work as an early
career professional. Directly, new engineers
who identify strongly enough with a model
of technical rationality are likely to strug-
gle to understand themselves as engineers if
they perceive a dilution of “pure” engineer-
ing work by what they perceive as “non-
engineering” work in professional practice
(Eisenhart & Finkel, 1998; Faulkner, 2008;
Korte et al., 2008). A similar dilution is expe-
rienced by architecture students who come
to see “designer” to be their dominant iden-
tity during their time in design school, only
to find that as practicing architects (espe-
cially early career) one does everything but
design and that design often “hangs in the
balance,” meaning that it is readily pushed
out by other aspects of architectural project
work, such as negotiating and coordinating
 128 cambridge handbook of engineering education research
with clients and contractors, managing con-
struction, and ensuring that design drawings
meet state and federal codes (Cuff, 1992;
cf. Stevens, 1999). A possible indirect effect
of the curricular model of technical ratio-
nality is that it may prevent students from
developing other imagined futures as engi-
neers; engineers do varied kinds of work
and play varied roles in their professional
work lives but this diversity of experience
is hardly visible in undergraduate education
(Eisenhart & Finkel, 1998; Foor, Walden, &
Trytten, 2008; Steering Committee of the
National Engineering Education Research
Colloquies, 2006). Whether the tensions are
direct or indirect, what is obscured for stu-
dents are the identity elements of hetero-
geneous engineering practice that engineer-
ing students typically do not see or learn to
value as central – those related to commu-
nication, coordination, organizing, and per-
suasion amidst people and technical prac-
tices and objects.
Two examples from ethnographic case
studies are suggestive of possible tensions
across the boundary of engineering edu-
cation and early career professional work
(O’Connor et al., 2007; Stevens et al., 2008).
In a first example, an engineering stu-
dent whose identity was heavily invested
in his sense of himself as a solver of well-
structured problems in the technological
rationalist mode (i.e., textbook math and
science problems that bracket out all the
nontechnical aspects of engineering prob-
lems) found himself quite confused and even
angry when late in his engineering educa-
tional career he first encountered a sub-
stantive version of engineering as hetero-
geneous and collaborative. When he first
participated in capstone design projects, and
into the early months of his first new posi-
tion as an engineer, this young man reported
being rather at sea, because the mathemat-
ics puzzle–solving skills that were so cen-
tral to how he saw his worth as a would-be
engineer suddenly had little practical value
in the formal and informal evaluations of his
new workplace community. A second exam-
ple from these case studies involves a young
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woman who opted out of her engineering
major into a communications-related field
during the middle stages of her undergrad-
uate educational career. This was a student
who was technically proficient, earned solid
grades, and was quite adept socially. Her
experience in engineering education was
soured, however, because she came to see
engineering as a field with little room for
how she understood herself, as a collabora-
tive “people person.” Based on her engineer-
ing education, she decided engineering itself
would be too individualistic and competitive
and did not feel that she belonged. Ironi-
cally, the very aspects of her identity that
caused her to opt out of engineering might
have made her a very valuable and unique
contributor to an engineering firm, where
these sorts of interpersonal skills seem to be
in high demand, especially when they are
combined with technical competence (Buc-
ciarelli & Kuhn, 1997), which this young
woman was clearly on the road to develop-
ing. Taken together, these case studies point
to a range of possible dilemmas and com-
plex transitions of personal and disciplinary
identification, as engineering students be-
come engineering professionals. This is a
topic of significant importance for future
research.
The Changing Character of
Engineering Work
In this section, we draw on current studies
of engineering work to address some of the
ostensibly major changes engineering work
is undergoing. We say ostensibly because,
as is often the case, rhetoric and ideology
may run ahead of demonstrable empirical
evidence. In particular we consider the fol-
lowing four issues as possible candidates
for major sources of change in engineering
work: the role of new technologies involved
in engineering work, globalization, new
kinds of engineering problems, and changes
to engineering work because of changes to
the contemporary cultures of young people
who are entering the profession.
 professional engineering work
New Technologies in Engineering Work
Broad conceptualizations of how to manage
engineering projects such as concurrent
engineering and product life cycle manage-
ment put a premium both on information
technology systems and on practices of
computer-supported collaborative work.
Clearly, engineers are making increased
use of computational technologies that
allow them to model and convert physical
artifacts in digital forms (Boland et al., 2007;
Yoo et al., 2010). Some commentators have
argued that an almost complete elimination
of manual labor in engineering is on the
near horizon, suggesting that it will be fully
displaced by symbolic labor at the interface.
According to Zussman, “engineering prac-
tice today is characterized by a near total
absence of that physical, hands-on labor that
is a central attribute of craft work. Engineers
manipulate symbols that refer to physical
objects, mostly equipment and products,
but they do not manipulate those objects
themselves” (p. 77). According to this view,
there is a clear division of labor in which
human mechanical labor and craftwork
is the purview of machinists, mechanics,
technicians, and automated machines.
That the lingua franca of engineering work
is increasingly realized in “digital form”
probably cannot be doubted as a general
historical direction. However, lacking sys-
tematic empirical studies of actual engi-
neering work, we should be cautious in
subscribing to this view, because it has an
ideological dimension. Similar ideological
perspectives about technology, in particular
CAD-CAM in the 1990s, far outran the
empirical realities of work practice of the
time in which paper-based representations
remained central (Downey, 1992, 1995; Hall
& Stevens, 1995; Henderson, 1991). Field
studies of engineering work practice seem
much needed in this area to understand
how technological change within engi-
neering work is changing the work itself
and to understand how these changes are
differentially affecting different participants
in engineering projects and concerns (e.g.,
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129
newcomers vs. old timers). For example, in
a study of roadway design in civil engineer-
ing described earlier (Hall & Stevens, 1995;
Stevens & Hall, 1998), the authors related
a story told by one of the project engineers
they were studying. The engineer said that
at a recent meeting of all the firm’s engi-
neers, the president of the firm announced
that if you had not learned to use CAD
in the next couple of years, “there would
not be a place for you” at the firm. The
engineer then recounted that he had heard
from some older engineers that they were
choosing to retire early rather than retool in
this way. Just as paper survived as a critical
medium for work in the purported age of
the “paperless office” (Sellen, 2003), manual
labor too may be thriving in engineering
work, if we see engineering work broadly.
Again, this is the sort of question that could
be answered substantively with field studies
of contemporary engineering work.
Globalization and Offshoring
Major shifts in the use of information
technology have combined with significant
changes in the global economy over recent
decades to increase the globalization of engi-
neering work practice. Boeing’s approach
to their new “dreamliner” represents one
promise, and perhaps a cautionary tale,
about global distributions of engineering
work. As has been widely reported, the abil-
ity to use networked technologies allows
engineers to bypass the traditional bound-
aries of the workday to move projects along
“24/7” and to “offshore” significant parts
of engineering project work. This “follow-
the-sun” model was initiated by General
Electric’s initiatives in the early 1990s and
involves setting up coordinated teams across
the globe so that work can be handled by the
team where the sun was up, and then work
can be handed to the next team starting
their day in a different part of the globe. For
instance, a typical globally distributed team
might have workers in Japan, Singapore,
India, France, and the United States. Again,
ideology may outrun reality with respect to
 130 cambridge handbook of engineering education research
these globally distributed “teams.” Surely,
an opportunity for provocative and impor-
tant empirical field research exists in this
area, both for an investigation of the work
practices themselves as well as for how cul-
tural differences are understood and man-
aged (Downey et al., 2006; cf. O’Connor,
2001, 2003 for analyses of distributed work
processes in engineering education), in what
are undoubtedly conditions of dramatically
asymmetric power relations across global
sites.
A recent article by Will-Zocholl and
Schmiede (2011) draws on interviews with
engineers and managers to characterize
some the changes in the automobile indus-
try that have been driven by the dual
forces of new information technologies and
increased globalization. Based on an anal-
ysis of these interviews, the authors argue
that the automotive engineering work has
been significantly reorganized. Among the
changes they point to are significant off-
shoring of “standardized” engineering work
such as simulation processes and calcula-
tions. The authors also argue that “the core
of engineers’ work, design, is becoming
increasingly marginal . . . Other tasks, such
as communicating, coordinating, and trav-
eling, as well as administrative duties, are
becoming more important” (Will-Zocholl
& Schmiede, 2011, p. 13). A third point
the authors make relates directly to the
issue we just discussed – whether automo-
tive engineering is becoming “dematerial-
ized” (to use a term from Williams, 2002,
p. 48) – the idea that manual aspects of engi-
neering are disappearing. Although these
authors indicate that some aspects of the
work are dematerialized in the form of
computer-based models, they imply that
understanding materiality remains impor-
tant because at some point the two- and
three-dimensional images must be trans-
lated back into three-dimensional, moving
objects. Finally, this study casts some light
on potential existential or identity effects
of these changes; they highlight that the
engineers feel both less autonomous and
more insecure (about their jobs and their
futures) than they did in the past because
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of these changes toward globalization. In
fact they may have reason for this insecu-
rity, as recent articles argue that almost 40%
of work, even high-status “knowledge work”
of engineering, can potentially be offshored.
This puts the number of potentially out-
sourceable jobs at 20 million (Blinder, 2006;
Smith & Rivkin, 2008). It would seem valu-
able to build on this article to conduct field
studies that capture directly through obser-
vations or recordings (rather than through
retrospective reports as were the data source
in this study) the character of globalization-
induced changes to work and the shifting
meanings those changes have for engineers.
New Problems for Engineers to Solve
If engineers have been tied to the corpo-
ration and its broad goals of profit via the
mass production and sale of low-cost con-
sumer goods during the post–Second World
War period, the role of the engineer may
arguably change in the near future and
with it the qualities of professional engi-
neering work. Engineering is clearly impli-
cated in solving some of the planet’s biggest
problems, including sustainable energy, cli-
mate change, and famine. These are prob-
lems that call for a full-scale recognition
of heterogeneous engineering and its art-
ful practice, because these problems can
be ameliorated only through the organiz-
ing, maintaining, and adapting of complex,
large-scale sociotechnical systems. Whether
or not David Noble’s view that engineers
were domesticated servants for the ruling
class was a provocation made from exag-
geration, it is clear that if engineers of the
near future are to contribute substantially
to solving these kinds of global problems,
they will need to work for constituencies
other than large multinational industrial cor-
porations. This is because these often are
the very organizations that are seeking to
impede progress in solving these problems,
at least if it threatens their bottom line and
short-term growth outlook, which often it
does (cf. Hess, Breyman, Campbell, & Mar-
tin, 2007). A study of engineering students’
beliefs about engineering, conducted across
 professional engineering work
four very different universities, suggests that
although social good is a loosely held aspi-
ration for engineering students, the reason
they most convincingly give for pursuing
engineering, and enduring its difficulties, is
to make a good living and have a comfort-
able material lifestyle, presumably within
a corporate engineering setting (Stevens
et al., 2008). This study suggests that engi-
neering education has not yet strongly reg-
istered a shift to a different image of engi-
neering work and that the identification with
corporate participation and financial reward
described by Downey and Lucena (2004) and
by Noble (1977) is a dominant ethos ‘on the
ground’ among contemporary engineering
students.2
Changes in the Population of Young
People Who Become Engineers
There was a time when engineers were
not trained, as is currently the nearly uni-
versal norm, through accredited univer-
sity engineering degree programs. Auyang
argues that from the Renaissance until about
World War I, “engineers and their prede-
cessors came mostly from working fami-
lies, toiled with their hands, relied more
on their thinking and experience than on
schooling, and were obliged to deliver prod-
ucts on demand” (p. 114). During this period,
apprenticeship and on-the-job training were
the norm and the current gap between
the academy and paid engineering work,
if it existed, would be narrow compared
to the contemporary situation. Gradually,
engineering became professionalized and
the training of engineers through accred-
ited programs became the norm. In the
United States, ABET certifies engineering
programs, a process that began in 1932 with
ABET’s predecessor organization, EPCD. In
the postwar war period, an image of engi-
neering competence was built out of a dual
commitment to an engineering science per-
spective and the image of the engineer of the
technological rationalist. During this period,
engineers were seen as a distinct category of
people and engineering as a distinct cate-
gory of work. However, in the current era,
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131
engineering seems to be undergoing a social-
historical transformation that Williams calls
“expansive disintegration”:
There is no “end to engineering” in the
sense that it is disappearing. If anything,
engineering-like activities are expanding.
What is disappearing is engineering as a
coherent and independent profession this is
defined by well-understood relationships with
industrial and other social organizations,
with the material world, and with guiding
principles such as functionality. Engineering
is “ending” only in the sense that nature is
ending: as a distinct and separate realm.
Engineering emerged in a world in which its
mission was the control of non-human nature
and in which that mission was defined by
strong institutional authorities. Now it exists
in a hybrid world in which there is no longer
a clear boundary between autonomous non-
human nature and human-generated pro-
cesses. Institutional authorities are also los-
ing their boundaries and their autonomy.
(Williams, 2002, p. 31)
With these changes and the growing ubiq-
uity of engineering-like activities across soci-
ety, the kinds of young people who aspire to
and matriculate into engineering degree pro-
grams is bound to change. Williams reports
a number of changes over the recent decades
at MIT, seeing what she calls “a new breed of
engineering student” (Williams, 2002, p. 58).
This new breed includes greater ethnic and
gender diversity, greater international diver-
sity, more upper middle class young peo-
ple, more young people of urban rather than
rural communities, and more young people
who see engineering from the very beginning
of the higher education careers as a route
to entrepreneurship, technology innovation,
and management. These are reports from an
elite university for engineering students, so
it is an open question whether these demo-
graphic shifts are similar across the wider
spectrum of accredited engineering colleges
and university programs.
It also seems as if the current generation
of young people who have “grown up digital”
(Brown, 2000) are likely to bring with them
a very different set of interests, assump-
tions, and capacities from just a generation
 132 cambridge handbook of engineering education research
before them. And with the rapid changes in
social media and digital, mobile technolo-
gies, this set of interests and capacities is
likely to remain a moving target for some
time. These incoming students will have
been weaned on mobile devices, instanta-
neous Web searching, and games – both sin-
gle player and massively multiplayer – on a
dizzying array of platforms. And the con-
sumer objects that they most aspire to own
(e.g., iPods, tablets, gaming systems) are
fairly clear hybrids of engineering and aes-
thetics, suggesting that the aesthetic dimen-
sions of engineering may become more
prominent. The current movement to edu-
cate for STEAM rather than just STEM
(i.e., including the Arts in Science, Tech-
nology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is
suggestive in this regard. These young peo-
ple also have and will continue to grow up
in a culture that makes heroes of technol-
ogy innovators who accumulate vast sums
of money, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates,
Mark Zuckerberg, Serge Brin, and Larry
Page.3
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have described research
on professional engineering work as it
relates, or fails to relate, to engineering
education. We have advanced an image of
professional engineering work as heteroge-
neous. It is our assumption that this image,
at least among many engineering educa-
tors, may appear foreign and may not align
well with what often counts as engineering
within the academy. If this assumption is
true, it seems worth trying to understand
why. One likely reason has to do with a
gap we have mentioned so far, but have
not brought into focus. This is the gap
between the work of engineering profession-
als outside of the academy and the work
of engineering faculty within the academy.
Here we are in speculative waters, because
there is not a body of research that under-
takes this comparison empirically. But some
differences seem clear and relevant. Like
that of most academics (ourselves included),
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the work of engineering faculty involves
teaching and research, as well as many activi-
ties that maintain the going concerns of their
workplaces, which are universities. Engi-
neering research is of course a form of
engineering work, but its accountabilities
are clearly different from the work prac-
tices of engineering professionals outside of
academia who are involved in realizing engi-
neering projects. In short, there is a clear gap
between what engineering faculty do in their
work and what most of their students will do
in theirs.
What we see as an appropriate response
to this gap is by no means to argue for the
disruption of the disciplinary research prac-
tices of engineering faculty. What we do see
as an appropriate response is to infuse engi-
neering education with new, more diverse,
research-based images of professional engi-
neering work. These images are as much for
faculty – who do different kinds of work – as
they are for the students. A fertile sub-field
of research dedicated to studying profes-
sional engineering work and connecting it –
both practically and conceptually – to engi-
neering education is much needed. A thriv-
ing subfield of this kind will address questions
that we believe all stakeholders share about
the continuities and discontinuities between
the work practices and identities of engi-
neering students and professional engineers.
It is important also to state that specific
directionalities for change are not assumed
in advocating this program of research. It is
an easy assumption to make that advocat-
ing this program of research implies advo-
cacy for reorganizing engineering education
to mirror professional work more closely.
We are by no means making this assump-
tion, though it is among the possibilities
we see. To understand why this does not
necessarily follow from the fact of a com-
parative program of research on engineer-
ing education and professional engineer-
ing work, consider the following analogy.
Each of the authors of this chapter iden-
tifies with the interdisciplinary field of the
learning sciences. The learning sciences as a
field has, like engineering, both “basic” and
“applied” elements. Basic elements involve
 professional engineering work
studying how people learn in a wide range
of contexts and applied elements involve
trying to design tools, materials, and envi-
ronments to improve learning and often to
organize it new ways. Most in the learning
sciences are emphatically not advocates for
the ways that learning is organized in K–12
schools, but most would agree that with-
out an understanding of how school-based
learning is organized, attempts to disrupt,
change, or reorganize K–12 practices will be
difficult if not fruitless (O’Connor & Allen,
2010; Penuel & O’Connor, 2010). By anal-
ogy, engineering educators may see simi-
lar problems with professional engineering
work and want to see it take very different
forms than it currently takes. We are argu-
ing that only by understanding the organiza-
tion of professional engineering work and its
effects on people, on nature, and on society
are those efforts to change professional engi-
neering work from the outside likely to bear
fruit.
At the same time, we do see possible
directions for change running from research-
based understandings of professional engi-
neering work into engineering education.
Specifically, the idea of heterogeneous engi-
neering is a potentially productive dis-
ruption for engineering education, which
arguably remains the bastion for the tech-
nical rationalist view of engineering. This
is not true everywhere but in many
places. So engineering education could itself
become more heterogeneous. This recogni-
tion would lead to a rebalancing of engineer-
ing education’s portfolio of learning oppor-
tunities, influences, and requirements to
make it clear that the human, organizing
aspects of engineering are as important to
engineering as its technical aspects, moving
toward what Stevens has sketched as a socio-
technical engineering education (in Adams
et al., 2011, cf. Trevelyan, 2010). Achieving
this rebalancing will almost certainly require
diversifying engineering departments them-
selves to include people who emphasize
the social aspects of engineering, so that a
future generation of students may come to
see the resistances of a local code review
agency or policymaker equally as relevant
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133
to the successful realization of engineering
projects as the resistances of a conductive
material.
We also see possible directions for change
running from engineering education into
professional engineering practice, changes
that would themselves deserve study in the
comparative research program we have out-
lined here. In this chapter, we have dis-
cussed research that has argued that engi-
neering education is currently tilted toward
an image of success in engineering that
emphasizes technical rationality, technical
innovation, business entrepreneurship, and
participation in the corporate profit-making
enterprise. We have shared research that
shows that across a wide range of contempo-
rary engineering students, many have vague
but compelling aspirations that engineer-
ing could be a force for “social good” but
most are clear that they are participating in
engineering education first and foremost for
the perceived financial security and com-
fortable material existence it promises. And
few seem to see those values of engineering
for “social good” enacted in their curricu-
lum or in their broader educational expe-
riences. But this could change and seems
to be changing in a handful of respected
engineering education programs. Some new
initiatives are flying under the banners
of “humanitarian engineering” and “social
entrepreneurship” (Wikipedia entries) and
others, such as Design for America, are
framed around interdisciplinary efforts to
design for solving “wicked problems” in soci-
ety broadly and for underserved communi-
ties. These initiatives are very compatible
with the image of heterogeneous engineer-
ing we have foregrounded here and go fur-
ther to enact values aligned with an “ethic
of care” (Riley, Pawley, Tucker, & Catalano,
2009) that is in some, if not significant, ten-
sion with goals for engineering education
that primarily stress novel technical innova-
tion and financial gain. Should future gener-
ations of engineering students have substan-
tive experiences and identification with this
image of engineering – how it can help solve
pressing social problems through heteroge-
neous engineering based in an ethic of care
 134 cambridge handbook of engineering education research
as much as in an ethic of financial gain –
newcomers to engineering firms could be
part of a historical process of transforma-
tion in professional engineering work. Such
changes would in turn invite new research
about how student identification with engi-
neering changes, who chooses to go into
engineering, and how this alternative image
reshapes broader images and effects of engi-
neering in society.
In this conclusion we have sketched just
a few ways that engineering education and
professional engineering work could influ-
ence each other in the coming years and
challenged easy assumptions about how
they should influence each other. These
images are informed by our own values
and, of course, the actual relations between
engineering education and professional engi-
neering work may evolve very differently.
Regardless of whether these directions of
influence take hold, we hope to have argued
that studies of professional engineering work
are not an elective for engineering education
research, but required coursework.
Footnotes
1. For another critique of CAD’s insertion in
engineering practice, and education, from a
different perspective, see Downey’s (1992)
“CAD-CAM saves the nation?”
2. This study did not seek to identify the source of
this ethos among engineering students, but this
is a topic of some interest because this strongly
held rationale for pursuing engineering seems
unlikely to come directly from engineering fac-
ulty, who often do espouse different values and
themselves do not typically practice engineer-
ing in corporate contexts.
3. Noticeable in assembling a list of this kind is
the absence of female technology icons.
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