Editorial: Standing on Each Other’s Shoulders

Abstract

The title of this editorial comes from the expression ‘if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’ – ametaphor 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 formof engineeringwork 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 20th 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 overcomedifferences in how they assessworth.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 thenext client, and thenext, and soon. FollowingYannMoulier 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.