The Diversity in Engineering (DinE) online bibliography is now available at http://inesweb.org/dine/. The bibliography is a searchable collection of journal articles and conference papers published...

In this paper, I import the conceptual tool of boundary work from other disciplines to the study of academic engineers and I expand on existing research on boundary work based on interviews from 10 engineering faculty members at a research-oriented university. Analyzing participants’ interview responses for language associated with boundary metaphors yields a rich lexicon of terms related to the complicated characterization and categorization of ideas and values that they associate with engineering. Through this analysis, I introduce the concept of boundary markers as conceptual objects that delineate the edge of a boundary. I define and describe a taxonomy of the different sorts of boundary work participants do as recognition, mapping, reproduction, and resistance. I argue that boundaries have characteristics of continuity, mobility, and functionality. This paper can enhance our understanding of academic engineering and engineering education by making visible – via a cognitive tool developed from their colleagues’ language – academic engineers’ own boundary work as they contest or reproduce boundaries of the profession and discipline of engineering.

As engineers of the Baby Boom generation retire from their career posts, novice engineers are entering the workplace. Workforce transformation and loss of strategic corporate knowledge underscore the need to generate understanding regarding engineering norms aiding or impeding knowledge transfer. While research exists regarding how Millennials learn, utilize technology for learning, and engage in social learning, no research exists utilizing generational categories as a means for analyzing behaviors that might support knowledge transfer .Using quantitative action research, this exploratory study investigates themes of engineering culture, communication, and generational norms. It begins by soliciting viewpoints of Baby Boom and Millennial engineers, comparing each generations’ communication preferences. Findings suggest that while communication differences do exist between the two engineering generations, similarities also abound. This paper discusses how revealing understanding and leveraging the generational communication similarities can be one means for fostering knowledge sharing within the culture of practicing engineers.

This article examines the role that native engineers trained in a foreign country play in international technology transfer, a topic in which the human factor has often been assumed as ‘tacit knowledge’ by historians of technology. The discussion explores the case of Basque engineers who graduated from the University of Liège in Belgium between 1850 and 1914. I first show that the high number of these graduates was, to a large extent, the result of a specific educational strategy, and will analyze the underlying social and entrepreneurial reasons for this. Next, I follow the actual interactions that took place between foreign suppliers and client companies, revealing a complex process in which the engineer (from hereon linking agent) served as a bridge between two places. Drawing on specific historical episodes of the Basque iron and steel industry, I examine the roles played by these linking agents in each of the four phases I judge important in any technology transfer: decision, acquisition, innovation, and diffusion.

While much is known about the experiences of women and racial/ethnic minorities in male-dominated fields such as engineering, the experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) identifying individuals remain unstudied. Our article breaks this silence with an exploratory study of the ways LGB students at a major research university in the western United States both experience and navigate the climate of their engineering college. Based on interviews and focus groups, we find that both pervasive prejudicial cultural norms and perceptions of competence particular to the engineering profession can limit these students' opportunities to succeed, relative to their heterosexual peers. Nevertheless, through coping strategies which can require immense amounts of additional emotional and academic effort, LGB students navigate a chilly and heteronormative engineering climate by ‘passing’ as heterosexual, ‘covering’ or downplaying cultural characteristics associated with LGB identities, and garnering expertise to make themselves indispensable to others. These additional work burdens are often accompanied by academic and social isolation, making engineering school a hostile place for many LGB identifying students. This research provides an opportunity to theorize categories of inequality within engineering that do not have visible markers, and to consider them within a broader framework of intersectionality.

While the material consequences of engineering projects figure prominently in modern world literature, individual engineers are hard to find. Despite the centrality of engineering knowledge and technologies in creating the very conditions of possibility for wide-ranging personal and collective dramas explored by literary artists, the task of imagining and depicting engineers' personal biographies, sociopolitical allegiances, emotional states, decision-making processes, or specific material actions has appealed to very few. Surveying the work of some of the most accomplished authors of the Caribbean, West Africa, South America, and South Asia, this article outlines dominant patterns in postwar representations of engineering as a disembodied, unreflective, almost inhuman force that has spurred or exacerbated social inequalities across the global south. It then examines more sympathetic, alternative countercurrents in the literary imagination that cast the engineer as a potential ally in more open, participatory forms of change across the same world regions. Through this juxtaposition, the article seeks to foster new reflections on optimal relationships between literary and engineering studies at a juncture marked by increasing interdisciplinary investigations and interrogations of globalization, development, and local and transnational inequalities.

In the United States, professional ethics has become a standard part of engineering education. Such educational practice has an intellectual history that invites critical reflection. This article constitutes one such reflection, oriented not so much toward historical knowledge or the production of more engineers as toward developing a critical appreciation of engineering from a broad historico-ethical perspective. The argument advances through three main sections. After an untitled introduction, one section provides a partial narrative overview of the historical emergence of and debates about codes of professional conduct in engineering ethics, highlighting the mid-twentieth-century articulation of engineers as having a paramount responsibility to protect public safety, health, and welfare. Another considers some of the ways engineering ethics so construed and associated codes have been introduced into engineering curricula through textbooks. A third section and conclusion consider contemporary discussions of potential transformations in engineering ethics, especially the idea of a policy turn, and in the process challenge the future of engineering ethics while raising the possibility of a discipline that might be called ‘post-engineering.’