Navigating standards – constituting engineering practices – how do engineers in consulting environments deal with standards?

Abstract

Standards and regulations can play a central role in policies to achieve environmentally sound and energy-efficient buildings. This paper sets out to explore how consulting engineers relate to standards designed to impose sustainability in the construction of new buildings and in waste management. The paper addresses four cases of engineering practices. The first case describes practical skills and tools involved in what the engineers considered as ‘normal’ practices when performing energy calculations in the development of new buildings. The second and third cases deal with energy in new buildings as well, but address practices that supported or enabled the engineers to go beyond minimum standards. Case four explores a heat production project and more specifically, how the engineer deals with solving a problem related to calculating energy substitution. Together, the cases represent situations with quite different degrees of uncertainty as to how to relate to standards, from relative certainty represented in the first case to relative uncertainty in the last case. We shall look closer at the practices such situations entail and how they constitute different types of consulting engineering practices.

Keywords:

• engineering practices
• standards and regulations
• consulting environments
• sustainable innovation

Notes

¹See Downey and Lucena, “Engineering Studies.”

²Ryghaug and Sørensen, “How Energy Efficiency Fails.”

³Hojem and Lagesen, “Doing Environmental Concerns.”

⁴Imrie, “The Interrelationships.”

⁵Müller, “The Legal Dwelling.”

⁶Imrie, “The Interrelationships.”

⁷Müller, “The Legal Dwelling.”

⁸Downey, “What Is Sustainable Engineering For?”

⁹Lampland and Star, Standards and Their Stories.

¹⁰Thèvenot, “Rules and Implements,” 30.

¹¹Ibid, 30.

¹²Becker and Clark, Little Tools of Knowledge.

¹³See Ibid.; Callon, “Writing and (Re)-writing Devices”; Latour, The Making of Law; Riles, Documents.

¹⁴Hojem and Lagesen, “Doing Environmental Concerns.”

¹⁵Fischer and Guy, “Re-interpreting Regulations,” 2590

¹⁶Ibid, 2590.

¹⁷Timmermans and Epstein, “A World of Standards,” 69.

¹⁸For instance, see Berker, “Dealing with Uncertainty”; Irwin and Vergragt, “Re-thinging the Relationship”; Sørensen, Aune, and Hatling, “Against Linearity.”

¹⁹Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers; Clegg, Kornberger, and Rhodes, “Learning/Becoming/Organizing”; Czarniawska and Jorges, “Winds of Organizational Change”; Gherardi, “Learning as Problem-Driven or Learning in the Face of Mystery?”

²⁰Petroski, The Engineer Is Human.

²¹Vincenti, What Engineers Know.

²²Telephone interviews were carried out by Thea M. Hojem.

²³Ryghaug and Sørensen, “How Energy Efficiency Fails.”

²⁴Hojem and Lagesen, “Doing Environmental Concerns.”

²⁵Filiatrault and Lapierre, “Managing Business-to-Business Marketing.”

²⁶Fischer and Guy, “Re-interpreting Regulations,” 2591.

²⁷Beck, Giddens, and Lash, Reflexive Modernization.

²⁸Schön, The Reflective Practitioner.

²⁹Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, 49.

³⁰Vincenti, What Engineers Know.

³¹Sørensen, Energiøkonomisering på norsk.