Standard Grant: Engineers and the Globalization of Expertise

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

This is a hybrid project in the history of engineering that develops research infrastructure, a large database, and then uses that infrastructure to engage in research to write a new history of the first generation of global engineers, the international networks they established, and their growing influence on the diffusion and organization of technical, expert knowledge over a 60 year period. The study will provide the most detailed study yet of the globalization of professional engineering expertise. The researchers will also build a public-facing website that makes their data openly available to other scholars while providing an interactive educational tool for students, classes, and general public use; the project will yield materials for future scholars and for general education. The database will be available for open access through a website curated by the University of Notre Dame. The website will draw from the database and the case studies to provide interactive features for the general public and for support of new course syllabi and classroom use. The project begins with the development of the largest available database of individual engineers drawn from sources in the U.S., Britain, and Germany. The database will contain information on engineers’ education, their membership in professional associations, their (global) places of employment and positions, and their interactions on the pages of professional journals. The researchers will then produce scholarly publications on the history of professional engineering in the modern world that examine a global network unbounded by corporate and national identities. Their database will enable them to identify a set of questions and hypotheses that informs their selection of case studies that examine local experiences of the global network around the world. They will also gather a group of eight collaborating scholars to review the findings of their database work and to contribute a set of focused, qualitative, archivally-based case studies that explore, in detail and in local settings around the world, the questions raised by the database work. By mapping the global diffusion of, and new networks established by, professionalized engineering expertise, the researchers can bring to light the importance of engineers in the modern world including their role in broader histories of technocratic planning, economic development, and of modern capitalism generally. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.