Exploring Engineers’ Boundary Work

This special issue aims to advance the scholarly understanding of engineers’ boundary work, focusing on their professional knowledge and their interaction strategies as they navigate complex challenges.¹ Specifically, the essays collected here explore how engineers fortify, adapt, or overstep boundaries between themselves and other domains of knowledge or groups of actors, as they confront new challenges.

Previous research has extensively documented the strategies engineers employ to cement their professional boundaries. These strategies vary, ranging from competitive to collaborative, even to create a new, separate area with adjacent fields. Just like other professionals, engineers’ collective responses, whether coordinated or not, aim to safeguard their professional integrity and standing.² To defend their professional career track³ and the quality of ‘real engineering’,⁴ they combine scientific rigor, technical proficiency, and distinctive personal qualities into the criteria for entering the profession.⁵ These efforts for identity building have enabled engineers to state, ‘Anyone, but not everyone’⁶ could become an engineer.

However, the boundary is not underpinned only by scientific and technical rigor. Drawing inspiration from feminist, critical race, and postcolonial studies, scholars have uncovered how gender and race are intimately woven into both the construction of professional boundaries and our understanding of the profession, instating and naturalizing hierarchical relationships between social groups.⁷ They demonstrated that those societal factors have contributed to maintaining white heterosexual males’ domination⁸ while preventing minorities from entering the field, such as women,⁹ immigrants,¹⁰ or sexual minorities.¹¹ Amy Sue Bix¹² and Wendy Faulkner and Merete Lie¹³ have highlighted the deployment of numerous strategies aimed at enhancing the recruitment of women and alleviating their marginalization within the engineering domain, highlighting continuous commitment from both individuals and institutions. Nevertheless, their outcomes have frequently been modest due to the entrenched culture of white male dominance, strongly embedded in the identity of engineering fields and the evaluation of individual expertise,¹⁴ and the adaptive strategies marginalized groups employ to navigate this environment.¹⁵

Informed by the works mentioned above, this special issue contributes to the literature by investigating how engineers continuously renegotiate boundaries at the local level while selectively relying on the elasticity and rigidity of boundaries.¹⁶ Collectively, the articles in this special issue demonstrate engineers’ ability to reconfigure boundaries in sync with their evolving roles and, if necessary, venture beyond their ontological and epistemological comfort zones, compelling them to cross and blur the lines that define professional and social boundaries.¹⁷ At the organizational level, the engineer’s leadership has expanded to encompass management and business responsibilities. While the role of engineer-manager has existed since the early twentieth century,¹⁸ this dual capacity has gained more prevalence over the last century to the extent that, for instance, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley would only choose start-ups with engineers at the head.¹⁹ This evolution has required engineers to expand their knowledge and practices into other fields notably finance²⁰ and ethics.²¹ This expansion is due to their current placement in an extensively interdisciplinary workflow.²² which Peter Robbins et al.²³ have characterized as borderland activity.

Consequently, engineering schools have adapted their curricula to provide future ‘entrepreneurs’ with organizational and communication skills, partly imposed by accreditation systems, such as ABET in the US and CTI in France.²⁴ However, the expansion of curricula in engineering schools did not occur without resistance. For instance, Matthew Wisnioski²⁵ demonstrated how the integration of liberal arts into engineering education constituted a battleground between critics of engineering education and certain segments of the engineering community in the US during the 1960s. Proponents of the integration argued that the scope of engineering education was too narrow, technical, and disconnected from the social implications of technological development. In contrast, some in the engineering community viewed the incorporation of interdisciplinary topics as a departure from the core principles and values of engineering.

In this regard, in this issue’s first article, Catherine Roby provides insights into the complex integration of knowledge beyond traditional technical disciplines in French engineering schools. The author scrutinizes the longstanding division and hierarchization of knowledge and the resistance toward any efforts to reconfigure established frameworks. She analyzes the palpable reluctance within French engineering schools to acknowledge alternative epistemological paradigms, particularly those emanating from the humanities and social sciences. It is argued that the resistance is not merely a result of technical obstinacy but is also deeply rooted in socio-political dynamics that resist any substantial efforts to introduce flexibility into the course and deconstruct traditional paradigms.

Nevertheless, Roby also reveals some instances of permeability in the disciplinary boundaries – particularly in niche institutions like technological universities and agronomy schools, where social sciences and humanities are treated as scientific disciplines on par with engineering subjects. Still, the author asserts that these cases are more the exception than the norm in the country, suggesting that while boundaries may be somewhat malleable, their fundamental rigidity endures. Consequently, the author states that the dominant approach in engineering education in France remains one that does not critically interrogate the social order or question the role of science and technology in society, thereby limiting the scope for interdisciplinary dialogue and intellectual pluralism.

However, the rigidity in protecting the boundary of engineering education above does not imply that engineers are merely interested in fortifying their contours in practice. When necessary, engineers strategically reinterpret and adjust boundaries to form alliances with other disciplines. In the second article of this issue, Jongheon Kim analyzes the Human Brain Project (HBP) and demonstrates how the project’s member engineers have strengthened or weakened their disciplinary boundaries with scientists and project managers in an effort to expand their roles and secure leadership positions within the project. Initially, the European Commission (EC) conceptualized the HBP through an engineering lens, focusing on infrastructure development. The project experienced shifts in its infrastructure objectives due to ensuing controversies, prompting the EC to temporarily lower its infrastructure requirements and attribute a certain level of leadership and autonomy to participating scientists. This shift was later reverted once stability was restored within the project, exemplifying how the manipulation of boundaries between science and engineering becomes a tactical maneuver. This boundary fluidity, as the author posits, partly demonstrates that the politics surrounding research infrastructure are often guided more by political ambitions than by rigid scientific imperatives.

Kim also highlights that, throughout the HBP’s evolution, engineers actively shape these boundaries to consolidate their leadership roles within the project, beyond merely benefiting from external political shifts. Capitalizing on the EC's insistence on tangible digital platforms over academic papers, engineers seized the opportunity to secure their leadership in the project. A group of neuroinformaticians and supercomputing experts led a reconceptualization of the project, not only meeting EC stipulations but also distancing the initiative from its earlier controversies. Moreover, the group advocated a reorganization of the project into problem-oriented work packages that aligned directly with the infrastructure to be built. This strategic re-hierarchization allowed engineers to regain leadership, effectively utilizing the EC's requirements to shift the boundaries between science and engineering. Thus, engineers orchestrated a transformation that both satisfied the EC’s expectations and realigned the HBP with infrastructural objectives.

Finally, in this issue’s last article, Antoine Bouzin sheds light on how engineers embrace the duality between engineering epistemological order and environmental activism. The author indicates, traditionally, French engineers have often compartmentalised their work as rational, objective, and neutral, sharply demarcating it from activism, which is perceived as ideological, passionate, and conflict-prone. Some of the engineers in his study choose to uphold this boundary, separating their professional duties from their activist leanings and relegating their advocacy efforts to settings outside their corporate environment. These individuals adhere to a traditional conceptual framework that bifurcates their professional identity from their activist pursuits. In doing so, they tacitly endorse the modern dichotomy between techno-scientific and socio-political realms, a division that has tangible consequences when trying to apply engineering skills to broader societal issues like environmentalism.

However, Bouzin argues that this boundary is increasingly seen as mutable rather than static, inviting reflective deliberation among environmentally conscious engineers. He shows that other engineers actively blur or transcend this boundary, integrating activism into their professional identity. A subset seeks to shift the boundary within their professional settings by leveraging their technical expertise as a form of activism, generating emotional responses and commitment to environmental causes among colleagues and supervisors. Others, more radically, go beyond this boundary, questioning the very structures within which they operate. These engineers contend that meaningful environmental change cannot occur within companies tethered to capitalist economic systems, and they contemplate careers beyond the conventional engineering landscape. This continuous renegotiation between professional and activist roles leads to an ongoing process of interpretation, appropriation, and action, intricately tying their work activities to the environmental causes they champion.

In conclusion, this special issue underscores that the boundaries engineers navigate are less related to specific characteristics of engineering knowledge than to broader social orders. These boundaries are not static but continuously renegotiated at multiple levels, influenced not only by professional demands but also by social, cultural, and institutional frameworks. Engineers are increasingly willing to traverse or blur the lines between traditional, technically narrow professional epistemology and social considerations, such as environmental activism or interdisciplinary engagements. This flexibility often emerges as a tactical response to complex challenges that extend beyond technical problem-solving, requiring an integrated understanding of social and ethical dimensions. This boundary work is deeply informed by social hierarchies and cultural norms, which have historically been constructed to maintain specific power dynamics, such as the exclusion of minorities and the perpetuation of gender biases. Thus, the elasticity and rigidity of professional boundaries in a given context, as well as the capability of engineers to reconfigure these boundaries, aligns with an evolving landscape of responsibilities and societal expectations.

Acknowledgements

The Special Issue Editors extend their heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Jessica Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Engineering Studies, former Editor-in-Chief Dr. Cyrus Mody, Managing Editor Dr. Kacey Beddoes, and the other members of the editorial board for their invaluable assistance at each stage of this journey, without which this special issue would not have been possible. We also wish to express our sincere appreciation to the authors for their diligent writing and revisions. Their dedication has greatly enhanced the quality andimpact of this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gieryn, “Boundary-work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science”; Langley et al., “Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations”.

2 Langley et al., “Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations”; Abbott, The System of Professions.

3 Jammet and Sainsaulieu, Les ingénieurs et leurs compétences non techniques.

4 Robbins, Wield, and Wilson, “Engineering for Development as Borderland Activity.”

5 Friedensen, Rodriguez, and Doran, “The Making of ‘Ideal’ Electrical and Computer Engineers”; Riley, “Rigor/Us.”

6 Rohde et al., “Anyone, But Not Everyone.”

7 Slaton, Race, rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering; Pereira, “Boundary-work that Does not Work”.

8 Beddoes, “Guest Editorial – Exclusion and Inclusion in U.S. Engineering Education.”

9 Liebrand and Udas, “Becoming an Engineer or a Lady Engineer.”

10 Friesen, “Professional Integration as a Boundary Crossing.”

11 Cech and Waidzunas, “Navigating the Heteronormativity of Engineering.”

12 Bix, “From ‘Engineeresses’ to ‘Girl Engineers’ to ‘Good Engineers’.”

13 Faulkner and Lie, “Gender in the Information Society.”

14 Zwarteveen and Rap, “Guest Editor’s Introduction”; Beddoes, “Guest Editorial – Men and Masculinities in Engineering.”

15 Oldenziel, “Decoding the Silence”; Hatmaker, “Engineering Identity.”

16 Sainsaulieu, Surdez, and Zufferey, “The Political Socialization of Engingeers at Work.”

17 McNair, Davitt, and Batten, “Outside the ‘Comfort Zone’.”

18 See for example, Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers.

19 Charue-Duboc and Midler, “L’activité d’ingénierie et le modèle de projet concourant”; Sainsaulieu and Vinck, Ingénieur aujourd’hui.

20 Coutant, “Un capitalisme d’ingénieurs.”

21 Foley and Gibbs, “Connecting Engineering Processes and Responsible Innovation.”

22 McNair, Davitt, and Batten, “Outside the ‘Comfort Zone’.”

23 Robbins, Wield, and Wilson, “Engineering for Development as Borderland Activity.”

24 Kim and Sainsaulieu, “Lost in Translation?”

25 Wisnioski, Engineers for Change.