Editorial: Standing on Each Other’s Shoulders

The title of this editorial comes from the expression ‘if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’ – a metaphor famously used by Isaac Newton to describe the debts he owed to his predecessors.¹ It is a metaphor that – with some tinkering – applies nicely to the three articles in this issue of Engineering Studies. But the metaphor and those articles also – with some tinkering – invite reflection on how we interact with and learn from each other at this journal and in the wider field of engineering studies. So let me begin with the three articles and finish with some thoughts on the journal and the field.

Our first contribution, ‘Client-Facing Interprofessional Project Teams: The Role of Engineers’ ‘Situated Judgment’ by Rachel Wilde and David Guile, probably comes closest to the original ‘shoulders of giants’ imagery. The authors examine a form of engineering work that is increasingly common: teams that bring together representatives of various specializations (and often from several different contracting organizations) to carry out a project on behalf of a client and then disband. Obviously, this is not an entirely new phenomenon in engineering; indeed, historians such as Eda Kranakis have shown that the obstacles to good communication within such project teams have contributed to engineering disasters for well over a century now.² If anything, I think engineers should take some credit (or blame!) for the spread of ‘projectification’ from their profession to other high-tech industries (such as dot-commerce) and even to music (‘bands’ are so 20^th century).³ But projects are a natural auxiliary to neoliberal ways of organizing work (fewer employees, more contractors and freelancers) and thus as the neoliberal economy grows projects will be increasingly common – and thus should be of growing interest to engineering studies.⁴

The great strength and weakness of project teams is that they are heterogeneous and impermanent. Members often must forge a new working relationship whenever a new team is convened, and therefore have to re-learn who knows what about what every time. That process can result in frictions, because not all members have the same set of priorities; drawing on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s idea of ‘orders of worth,’ Wilde and Guile show how representatives of different engineering specialties come to recognize and then overcome differences in how they assess worth.⁵ That can be an arduous, ego-bruising process. But it’s a process that can add value to the project; not necessarily value for the current client, but perhaps value for the next client, and the next, and so on. Following Yann Moulier Boutang, the authors refer to these kinds of discussions as ‘immaterial activity.’⁶ Obviously there is a material basis for these interactions, but what Moulier Boutang and the authors mean is that the interactions are not costed – no one pays for engineers to hang out at the proverbial water cooler – and yet are essential to the completion of the project. Experiences brought from one project to the next – the giants’ shoulders that engineers stand on – are in this sense ‘immaterial,’ and yet are highly material, even indispensable, to project success.

And yet, engineers do not only apply past experiences but rather seek to go beyond them as they look to the future. That’s the subject of our next article, ‘Assessing Function Modeling Frameworks: Technical Advantage Predictions as a Conceptual Tool,’ by Dingmar van Eck and Erik Weber. The authors argue that systematic frameworks for modeling the functionalities of technologies and their components must be the basis for drawing on – and then improving on – past experience. They offer a philosophically rigorous approach – benchmarking – for comparing different function modeling frameworks, i.e. different systems for breaking a technology down, analyzing its functionalities, and then making incremental improvements to those functionalities. In other words, we need some analytic scaffolding to help us climb onto the giant’s shoulders.

This is, as the authors note, a somewhat different kind of Engineering Studies article. They describe three main strands of philosophical discussion of technology and engineering: 1) ‘systematic clarification of the nature of technology as an element and product of human culture;’ 2) ‘systematic reflection on the consequences of technology for human life;’ and 3) ‘systematic investigation of engineering, invention, designing and making of things.’ In general, philosophical studies in this journal are oriented more to (1) and (2), but van Eck and Weber proudly situate themselves in the tradition of (3). Yet toward the end of their article, the authors identify important overlaps among these strands of philosophy. With specific respect to their own study, they argue that the criteria that are applied in comparisons between a technology and its incrementally improved versions cannot escape the values that are at stake in strands (1) and especially (2), even if making the comparison rigorous is a project of strand (3). In particular, elements of sustainability (e.g., lower energy use or reduced toxicity after disposal) may be valued more highly after ‘reflection on the consequences for human [and more-than-human!] life,’ but rigorous function modeling is necessary in order to create designs that actually improve on their predecessors with respect to sustainability.

Our third article, ‘The Making of Engineering Technicians: Ontological Formation in Laboratory Practice,’ by Christine Winberg, relates to ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ in a slightly different way. As in the first two articles, Winberg looks at practices whereby past technological knowledge gets passed on or improved upon. But whose knowledge? The author argues that in some engineering contexts, it is the knowledge of technicians that engineers and engineering students acquire and eventually build upon, rather than the knowledge of other engineers or engineering faculty members.

It is important here to remember that Newton used the ‘shoulders’ metaphor in a letter to Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s curator of experiments and ‘assistant’ to Robert Boyle. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer famously showed, the epistemological tests applied by members of the Royal Society meant Hooke struggled to be seen as making ‘knowledge’ with any of his experiments.⁷ He was an employee of gentlemen, rather than a gentleman himself. Boyle and his peers saw Hooke as dependent upon the outcome of his experiments and therefore an unreliable witness of those experiments. Thus, an independent gentleman of means – Boyle – had to be the public face of the experiments, while the role of Hooke and other assistants had to be minimized. Indeed, other contributors – including Boyle’s sister Lady Ranelagh (Katherine Jones) and several of her servants – had to be occluded entirely. Hooke was rather exceptional in that he was an ‘invisible technician’ who was not entirely invisible.

Yet contra Boyle and company, technicians matter – a lot. A few studies have already looked at the important roles technicians play in research laboratories and commercial settings.⁸ For her article, Winberg draws our attention to the work of technicians in educational settings, specifically engineering technician programs at two South African universities of technology. She explores a number of different practices technicians use to convey knowledge to students effectively: speaking their students’ language (literally – the South African setting is highly multilingual) and telling jokes and self-deprecating stories to put them at ease; projecting control of ‘their’ space and their own bodies to help students identify the technicians as the authoritative but also approachable voice within that space; configuring materials and experimental set-ups so that students see knowledge in application. As in Wilde and Guile’s article, technicians’ practices are ‘immaterial’ in the sense that their value is often not explicitly acknowledged in their employers’ budgets – the technicians in Winberg’s study are clearly stretching scarce resources in creative ways. Yet for the students who interact with them, the technicians’ practices are highly material because they are materialized – in laboratory spaces, in clothing, in experimental set-ups, etc.

With Winberg’s study, we can start to see one of the problems with Newton’s ‘shoulders of giants’ metaphor. Who gets to count as a ‘giant?’ The term is, well, easily gendered, classed, and colored. Shapin’s ‘invisible technicians’ necessarily struggle to qualify as Newton’s ‘giants.’ The giant-centric understanding of science and engineering heaps praise on individual geniuses – mostly wealthy white men like Boyle – even though Newton and everyone since has stood on the shoulders of a great collective of ‘giants,’ known and unknown. Each generation benefits from the entirety of the generations before, not just the individual giants. Within our own time, we all stand on each other’s shoulders.

That is, I hope, the basis on which this journal operates, at least when things are running as they should be. Both our editorial practices and our explicit policies are intended to make this a collaborative and not-very-hierarchical effort. We – I – don’t always succeed, but that’s the aim. Every article has individual authors’ names attached to it, but every article has also benefited from multiple layers of review by me, our Managing Editor, Kacey Beddoes, our associate editors, and our referees. One crucial aspect of that review is to draw authors’ attention to the various scholars that they should cite and engage with – the ‘giants’ whose shoulders can give them a lift. Another feature of the editorial process – especially in the later stages – is that we encourage authors to explain their ideas directly and with sentences where the intended meaning is close to the surface, so that our readers can someday stand on their shoulders. In other words, authors have an obligation to those whose ideas they work with, and those to whom they are conveying their own ideas. The other participants in that process have their obligations as well: above all, to return timely, accurate, and helpful advice in a constructive and civil manner. I realize that we are all overstretched and fulfilling those obligations is difficult; but just know that requests to review, or edit, or write for this journal are invitations to participate in a community where we help each other out, and that your help is always appreciated.

That spirit is also very much in evidence in the organization this journal is affiliated with, the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES). As our outgoing chair, Atsushi Akera, likes to point out, INES is a network not a professional society; we don’t exist to gatekeep our members’ expertise, but rather to facilitate our members to communicate with and help each other, and to connect with communities beyond our membership. If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware of INES and may have pitched in to support the network’s activities; if so, remember to renew your membership for 2022! And if you’re not familiar with INES but would like to know more, visit https://www.inesweb.org.

And on that note, a final word of thanks. At Engineering Studies and in INES we don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but instead take turns standing on each other’s shoulders. We also try not to let anyone be an ‘invisible’ technician – so it’s important to occasionally point out friends of the journal and thank them for their contributions. This time, I particularly want to thank Atsushi for incredible leadership of the network, and to welcome our new chair, Jessica Smith. I also want to convey the journal staff’s gratitude to INES’ outgoing secretary/treasurer, Alice Clifton-Morekis, for keeping us solvent. We’re looking forward to working with the new secretary/treasurer, Konstantinos Konstantis, who is moving over from running INES’ social media accounts. This journal wouldn’t exist – and wouldn’t have a reason to exist – without INES, and thus not without the efforts of the people I’ve just mentioned and many more.

Notes

1 Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants.

2 Kranakis, “Fixing the Blame.”

3 Though not quite framed in this way, some windows onto projectification can be found in: Neff, Venture Labor; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; and Saxenian, Regional Advantage.

4 Scranton, “Projects as a Focus.”

5 Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification.

6 Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism.

7 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump; Shapin, A Social History of Truth.

8 See the essays in Barley and Orr, Between Craft and Science.