Globalization and organizational change: engineers’ experiences and their implications for engineering education

Abstract

The demand for flexible engineers presents significant challenges to engineering education. Among these is the need for engineers to be prepared to understand and deal with organizational change. Yet engineering education and research on engineers have overlooked the impact of organizational change on engineering work. After outlining the impact of globalization on organizational change, this paper contributes to our understanding of how engineers experienced organizational change immediately after a merger when two major aerospace companies came together, bringing two different corporate cultures together and different models for the organization of work. Based on the analysis of these experiences, this paper offers, first, a hypothesis connecting engineers’ educational experiences with their responses to organizational change and, second, a curriculum proposal to help students prepare for the complex experiences of engineering work in ever changing organizations.

Keywords:

• Globalization
• Organizations
• Engineers
• Management
• Curriculum development