our knowledge ourselves: engineers (re)thinking technology in development

Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 20, 739–750 (2008)

Published online in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1493

OUR KNOWLEDGE OURSELVES:ENGINEERS (RE)THINKING TECHNOLOGY

IN DEVELOPMENT

GORDON WILSON*

The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Abstract: A re-conceptualisation of technology (and science) in development is claimed to be

taking, or have recently taken place. There is more than one variant, but they have in common a

pluralist, constructivist conception of knowledge and its importance for development. What,

however, do professional practitioners of technology in development say about their values,

their mindsets and their practices, and what, if anything, does this sense-making contribute to

the re-conceptualisation? Based on interviews with development-related engineers from a

previous research project, and analysis of engineer perspectives that are provided on a private

sector company website, this exploratory paper offers some preliminary observations. These

include:

*CMi

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orrelton

py

positive attitude to working with others and their realities, especially but not exclusively

other professional realities

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concern with enhancing their professional identity
� T
he interplay between retrospective reflection and ongoing enactment through projects
� T
he motivation associated with a ‘can-do mindset’ and the importance of creativity for job
satisfaction and enhancement

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he general importance of shared experience gained through working with others.
Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: development; knowledge; technology; engineers; sense-making; identity; shared

experience

spondence to: GordonWilson, DPP, Ground Floor Chambers Building, The Open University, Walton Hall,Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

right # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

740 G. Wilson

1 INTRODUCTION

For many years technology’s role in development has been debated, by academics and

practitioners alike, through a political economy lens. The lens has provided many insights

associated with access, capabilities, power, control, regulation, policy and impact.

This paper takes a different approach, being an exploratory study of the sense that

professional technology actors themselves make of their participation in development-

related work. It draws on the more recent epistemological conceptualisation of technology

in development, a conceptualisation which does not deny previous insights, but enriches

and adds fresh dimensions. In this new conceptualisation, technology in development has

moved from an often-implicit positivist epistemology of embodying and applying

scientific discovery to a constructivist epistemology where it remains a knowledge system

with a significant contribution to make, but is situated among other knowledge systems

with which it interacts.

If this interaction is purposeful (e.g. with development in mind), we can conceive of a

system of the different systems. Within it, technology is negotiated and the knowledge the

overall system embodies is produced through inter-subjective engagement between the

different knowledge actors. This suggests a need in the new conceptualisation to consider

the engaging actors, including the professional technology actors which are the focus of

this paper. There are two sets of questions which follow in relation to the latter. Firstly, do

the implicit theories-in-use of these actors accord with the new conceptualisation?

Secondly, to the extent that they do accord, what then do these actors make of their role and

what does what they make of their role bring to the conceptualisation?

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the evolving

narrative on technology in development since the 1960s, outlining the insights from

political economy and moving to the ‘epistemological turn’ of the 1990s. Section 3

introduces some relevant ideas on agency and Section 4 sets up the empirical exploration

within a sense-making framework that is drawn from the management/organisation

literature. Section 5 presents the findings of the sense that engineers, as a proxy for

professional technological agents, make of their work and role, and Section 6 briefly draws

these findings together into hypotheses for further research.

2 THE CHANGING FACE OF TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT

It is usual to start a narrative such as this with a triggering event, or an epoch from which I

can take a cue. Being European, I might have started with an invention, such as the

printing press in Europe in the fourteenth century that brought ‘books and education out of

the monasteries and [spread] them far and wide among the people’ (Dyson, 1999: 50).

Being of British origin, I might instead have chosen the agricultural and industrial

revolutions of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, which were enabled by

machine inventions and which resulted in a major spurt in economic development. Or, I

might have chosen a later period of the nineteenth century which saw the ‘technologies of

public health, clean water supply, sewage treatment, vaccination and antibiotics’ (Dyson,

1999).

I choose none of the above as starting points. Important as they were, we tend to view

them now as events that happened in the course of a historical process, rather than having

been heralded in advance and then deliberately enacted. It is, however, the latter sense of

Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 20, 739–750 (2008)

DOI: 10.1002/jid

Our Knowledge Ourselves 741

conscious agency that is important for this paper. Instead, therefore, I turn to a later epoch

and a quotation from the 1960s that consciously articulated, in terms of its potential

contribution to the future, the role of technology in development:

[Modernisation means] in the realm of technology, the change from simple and

traditionalised techniques towards the application of scientific knowledge. (Smelser,

1968: 126)

Modernisation was the dominant development paradigm of the 1960s. The quotation

carries a message of inevitability based on an implied positivist epistemology

where technology embodies the knowledge on which the future is based: it is necessary

to flow with the tide of technology and modernisation—to enact it—rather than against

it.

The modernisation paradigm of the epoch applied equally to the ‘developed’ North

as it did to the ‘developing’ South. It was also accepted at both ends of the political

spectrum. For example, on coming to power in 1964, after a campaign that included

embracing ‘the white heat of the technological revolution’,1 the British Labour Party

committed to ‘harness socialism to science, and science to socialism’ (Williams et al.,

1978: 51). The political argument was not thus about the pros and cons of modernisation,

but about how it should be brought about and to whose ends it would serve. Technology

(and science) was therefore firmly located in political economy where it was linked to the

means of production and an essential question concerned who owns the technology, or has

access to it. The question is posed still today, as for example in definitions of the digital

divide.

Subsequent debate about technology in development evolved along two lines. The first

maintained the modernisation focus on economic growth and development, but took to task

its assumption that technology might simply be transferred, or copied, from the ‘first’ to

‘third’ world. Arguing that the ‘black box’ had to be opened, it thus switched attention to

‘technological capabilities’, and about how these might be built (Bell and Pavitt, 1993;

Ernst et al., 1994: 5). This focus was further extended in the 1990s to apply to developing

countries the concept of National Systems of Innovation, defined as the learning and

innovation-based activities and actors and institutional networks by whose concerted

action a national economy builds its technological, business and industrial strength

(Lundvall, 1992).

The second line has been more concerned with human development and lends itself to

sociological analysis rather than economics. Modernisation theory itself accepted that

technological change resulted in both winners and losers. Thus Smelser (1968: 127)

referred to ‘social disturbances—mass hysteria, outbursts of violence, religious and

political movements, etc.—which reflect the uneven advances. . .’. An added dimension in

the following decade was that technological change in the name of development had

unintended consequences (Winner, 1977: 91–98), including unseen cultural and gender

implications. One response was the ‘Appropriate Technology’ movement, which attempted

to locate technology adoption criteria in ‘local’ economic, social, political and cultural

contexts and created checklists of questions to enable practitioners to address such criteria

(e.g. Brace Research Institute, quoted in Lawand et al., 1976: 132).

1The phrase is from a speech from Labour Party Leader, Harold Wilson, to the Party conference in 1963 a fewmonths before he became Prime Minister.


DOI: 10.1002/jid

742 G. Wilson

Complementing this second line of debate at a macro-level, an ideological critique of

technology developed: that it is inextricably bound with an inequitable capitalist system.

Thus, in a book published in 1974, David Dickson wrote:

My general thesis is that technology plays a political role in society, a role intimately

related to the distribution of power and the exercise of social control. . .At a material

level, technology sustains and promotes the interests of the dominant social group

of the society in which it is developed. At the same time, it acts in symbolic manner

to support and propagate the legitimating ideology of this society. . . (Dickson,1974: 10).

A variant of this theme was that technologies that might combine with the rhetoric

of poverty reduction are merely shoring up the structures that maintain poverty. More

generally this critique relates to Cowen and Shenton’s (1996: 7) description of

development as amelioration of the disordered faults of progress. In the critical

development literature, technology thus became entrenched as part of the problem to the

extent that mere mention of the word usually contained pejorative undertones, and

associated words and phrases—for example ‘technocratic’ and ‘technical fix’—were used,

again pejoratively, to describe almost any intervention that did not address the structural

issues of development (Wilson, 2006). Recent calls to ‘democratise’ technology and

make it more ‘political’ and responsive to development needs can be traced as an extension

of the theme.

The fundamental questions in the second line of debate were: Who owns (or has access

to) the technology? What do they do with it? Who benefits and who loses? Important as

they are, these questions did not link fundamentally to issues of epistemology. A taken-for-

granted positivist presumption prevailed, although, by asking about the cultural content of

technology, the Appropriate Technology movement came close to questioning its

knowledge base. Then, during the 1990s, this changed to the extent that we can now look

back at an epistemological turn where technology in development has become associated

with a pluralist, constructivist view of knowledge.

Many claim that the trigger which brought knowledge and how it is produced to the

forefront of development thinking was the World Development Report of 1998/1999,

‘Knowledge for Development’ (World Bank, 1999). But the ‘turn’ towards a pluralist,

constructivist epistemology was actually well under way by then through participatory

development and especially the work of Robert Chambers that culminated in his book

‘Whose reality counts?’ (Chambers, 1997). Thus, in the year of the ‘Knowledge for

Development’ report, Nederveen Pieterse (1998) was able to report that ‘positivism is

largely a past station’. Even the notion of ‘participatory technology development’ appeared

briefly on the stage in the mid-late 1990s through the work of the Intermediate Technology

Development Group (now re-named ‘Practical Action’).

A further important influence this century has been the work of the Science and Citizens

programme at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex (e.g. Leach et al., 2005).

Also, there has been confluence with the economic development focus which formed the

first line of debate outlined above. Here the recent work on innovation systems2 now

describes innovation in terms of multiple systems of knowledge, its production and

2Note the dropping of ‘national’ as an acknowledgement that this has increasingly become a problematic boundaryto maintain.


DOI: 10.1002/jid


application (Hall, 2005), where science and technology are key, but not the only, elements

(Ayele and Wield, 2005). The challenge is to find synergies between these systems while

respecting their differences (Hall, 2005). From this, Ayele and Wield claim for (science

and) technology3 a ‘recent re-conceptualisation of its role’ in development.

3 TECHNOLOGICAL AGENTS IN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

Acceptance that technology in development has been re-conceptualised in the way

described suggests a need to focus on the agents of knowledge systems and how they might

work with each other so that synergies are indeed achieved.

Bruno Latour was among the first to examine science and technology as made through

networks of agents created by scientists and engineers. Other agents might include various

government departments and firms who stood to benefit (and therefore be prepared to

sponsor the science/technology). Latour, however, was not writing about development as

such. His seminal work ‘Science in Action’ (Latour, 1987) makes only passing reference to

development contexts, being more concerned with science—and technology—making for

status, commercial gain or control over populations near and far.

‘Science in Action’ did devote a chapter to non-scientists, what we would call today

‘publics’ and which are a key concern of contemporary development practice. They are,

however, described as the ‘multitudes left out of the networks’ (Latour, 1987: 180) and a

passive, manipulated bunch. This contrasts with the more recent development and science

and technology studies literatures, where publics, as citizens, are conceptualised

potentially as active agents. Thus, Leach et al. (2005: 12–4; 28–9) write about

‘performative’ citizens as agents in science and technology policy, and Cornwall and

Gaventa (2000) on their role as ‘makers and shapers’ in development.

Almost the mirror image of Latour, the tendency within the development literature,

however, has been not to consider professional technological agents, who are usually

accorded only circumscribed agency as power-seeking, self-important implementers

within the staus quo (for a review, see Robbins, 2007). Because of their assumed positivist

tendencies they are often conceived as part of the problem as Wilson (2006) has noted for

professional development experts generally.

In particular, there is no study that examines a professional, technological-actor

perspective per sewithin development contexts, although Robbins (2007) starts to enter the

arena through a comparison between ‘traditional’ engineers, as identified in the literature

and the 2005 Reith lectures, and a group of ‘reflexive’ water and sanitation engineers

working in the South. It is such an actor perspective that this paper seeks to capture in order

to add to the recent re-conceptualisation of technology in development. As a study of what

professional technological agents in development make of what they do, it relates to

retrospective ‘sense-making’ (for example, Weick, 1995, 2001) as found in the

management/organisation literature.

3It is common to refer to ‘science and technology’ in the same phrase as if they are a unity. I have argued elsewhere(Wilson, 2007) that they should be treated differently. In essence, technology, unlike science, is about practice inthe world. Technologists thus have to develop knowledge that is complementary to scientific knowledge. Thiscomplementary knowledge might be described as ‘rules of thumb’ that are gained tacitly through real-worldexperience. Also, like it or not, practising technologists have to engage with others, from different professions aswell as non-professionals. ‘In use’ they have always had a plural approach to knowledge.


DOI: 10.1002/jid

744 G. Wilson

4 SENSEMAKING AND METHODOLOGY

As indicated above, this is an exploratory study. A pragmatic approach, similar to that

suggested for case study research (Langrish, 1993), was adopted. Thus:

� W

Co

hile it is possible to identify more encompassing categories, engineers were used

as a proxy for professional technological agents as they form a clear, easily identified

group.

� T
he study makes no claims to be representative of the general body of engineers. Rather
two groups of engineers were chosen by repute. One was a group of seven Ugandan and

seven UK environmental health engineers whowere the agents in municipal partnerships

between the two countries of an earlier study conducted by the author with Hazel

Johnson (Johnson andWilson, 2006;Wilson and Johnson, 2007). We noted at the time of

our field work the highly reflective nature of the responses of these engineers and the

data have been trawled again for the purposes of this paper. The other group concerned

10 engineers who reflect on their jobs on the website of consulting design engineers,

Arup (Arup, 2007a). Coupled with a worldwide reputation for quality of its services,

Arup also has a reputation for corporate responsibility and commitment to sustainability.

A further rationale for choosing these two groups of engineers was their apparent

contrast. On one hand, the UK–Uganda municipal partnerships contained both southern

and northern public sector engineers who reflected on working in a southern context with

limited resources on infrastructure projects broadly related to environmental health (water

and sanitation, storm drainage, solid waste management, highways management). They

were, in other words, reflecting on development practice as conventionally understood

(Thomas, 2000), or Development with a big ‘D’. On the other hand, the Arup private sector

engineers were overwhelmingly from the North, working in varied locations (North and

South) and reflecting on their careers with the company, which ranged from 6 to 41 years.

Their reflections thus encompassed a broad range of projects and experiences, and were

often not conceived explicitly as development (and therefore are better described as

development with a small ‘d’). Moreover, although the Arup engineers did not refer to

resource availability in their reflections, the overall sense was that, relative to the municipal

engineers, their working contexts are resource-rich.

Although not conceived as such, the approach to data collection in the current study had

some basic similarities with case study method in that I was analysing agents who engage in

purposeful behaviour within multiple-stakeholder settings, for which the method is claimed

to be particularly suitable (Langrish, 1993). The main difference, however, was that I

examined the sense that these agents make of their behaviour, not the behaviour itself.

Sense-making seems to be a very apt description of the active component of my data.

Certainly these engineers, whether responding to semi-structured interview prompts (as

with the UK–Uganda municipal engineers) or to internal written prompts on a company

website (as with the Arup engineers) were doing more than interpreting. Rather they were

engaged in interplay between retrospection and ongoing enactment of their projects,

between reflection and invention. In so doing they projected positive identities of

themselves, acknowledged the presence of others either as working partners or as

inspiration, and extracted salient cues from their projects from which they told plausible

stories about themselves and their work. These essentially are the properties of sense-

making as defined by Weick (1995, 2001).

pyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 20, 739–750 (2008)

DOI: 10.1002/jid


Sense-making is both an analytical and a normative concept within the management/

organisation literature. It is analytical because this, according to Weick (1995, 2001), is

what organisations do as they chart their courses and evolve. It is normative because

creating opportunities for making sense are seen to be a positive organisational attribute.

Thus Weick (2001) concludes his later book with a 3-chapter section called

‘Applications of sensemaking’ where it is promoted, and where, in the final chapter, he

extends his analysis to ‘sensemaking as an organisational dimension of global change’. As

a result, much of this chapter is about the inter-stakeholder, the inter-organisational and the

inter-institutional.

It is, of course, in this extension of sense-making to global change that one notes

connections to international development. There is, however, a broader aspect that is

potentially interesting. This is the link between sense-making and theory-making, or rather

to a constructivist approach to theory-in-use.

Theory and sense-making are also connected in a practical way. A judgement of the

efficacy of a theory is its explanatory power and, indeed, whether or not it makes sense,

especially in attempts to enact it. An example of the latter would be the judgements on neo-

liberal theory in the early 1990s when attempts were made to enact it through structural

adjustment packages in low-income countries. The nature of the link warrants further

deliberation. For the purposes of this paper, however, what is important is that such a link

between sense-making and theory-making exists.

5 SO WHAT DO (SOME) ENGINEERS SAY ABOUT THEMSELVES AND

THEIR WORLDS?

I have noted above that the UK–Uganda municipal engineers and the Arup website

engineers were all sense-makers in that they exhibited its essential properties of seeking to

preserve and enhance positive identities of their profession, engaging in the interplay

between retrospection and ongoing enactment and working within a social context. The

study showed, however, that, not withstanding the contextual contrasts indicated in section

4, there was also congruence between them in terms of the substance of the sense they

made. Thus, these engineers put a premium on the following.

5.1 The Application of First Principles

These were referred to in two ways. Firstly, for the UK engineers of the municipal

partnerships there was the motivational challenge of having to ‘throw away the book’ and

go back to ‘first principles’ when addressing a problem in an unfamiliar, resource-poor

context (i.e. in Uganda). An Arup engineer implied that such motivation was related

to the pride engineers have in their creativity that can only be realised through working

from first principles. By this, these engineers meant returning to core concepts associated

with their disciplinary education and training. Secondly, however, first principles meant

asking fundamental questions, such as ‘Why do we need engineering?’ (a question asked

by another Arup engineer referring to the inspiration of Brunel), and to providing value-

driven answers such as a commitment to wider social goals (explicitly articulated by

several Arup engineers). Similarly a UK engineer from the municipal partnerships

described the motivation for his work in Uganda, undertaken in his own time with no extra

pay thus:


DOI: 10.1002/jid

746 G. Wilson

My profession, engineering, obtained its status [in the UK] through the great public

health works of the 19th century. Working in [Uganda] reminded me of those roots.

Many of the [UK] engineers I went to University with would give anything for that

experience.

5.2 A ‘can do’ Mindset

One Arup engineer was inspired by people with a ‘pioneering spirit’, another by ‘those

who ask ‘‘why not?’’ and then get down to doing something useful for mankind’. UK

engineers from the municipal partnerships referred to being driven by the ‘professional

challenge’ of engaging in practice in difficult circumstances. These and similar comments

from the two groups illustrate that a ‘can do’ mindset can exist across widely different

contexts. Relative resource availability is more enabling of ‘can do’ for Arup engineers

perhaps, while relative resource unavailability for the municipal engineers was a challenge

to meet.

5.3 Engagement with Others

All of the Arup engineers in someway promoted the value of working with others. For one,

the best part of the job was working with ‘young talents and high-quality people, from

varied backgrounds and cultures’. Generally, this referred to working with other

professionals where, in the Latour’s (1987: 177–257.) sense, their networks are quite short.

Contrary to Latour, however, who often sees networks as arenas of struggle, the agents are

perceived to be collaborating.

The UK engineers of the municipal partnerships also valued the ‘teams’ they formed

with their Ugandan counterparts, which were likewise professional-to-professional

engagements. Possibly because of their public sector roles, however, they recognised too

the importance of engagement with the public and other stakeholders in making and

shaping practical solutions, and thus required for their joint projects more extended

networks (1987). One UK engineer stated of public engagement experiences in Uganda

with respect to traffic management in central Kampala:

We have re-thought our public engagement here [in the UK]. No longer is it, here is

an engineering problem and a solution and this is how we’re going to do it. We had

had some experiences here ourselves, but having to go through that process [in

Uganda] of getting people on board has made you realise how important it is here....

For example, we wanted to put a bus lane on one of our roads. We were able to get

local people to support us—the community, the disabled.... This is a better way and it

questions the whole foundations on which you stand.

The quotation is worthy of examination. Following Latour (1987), public engagement

here is associated with alliance-making for the purpose of enacting solutions to problems.

Within this process, however, our research showed that the solution became modified, with

stakeholders such as the traffic police, the drivers of the mini-bus taxis that crowd

Kampala’s roads, and the hawkers who make a living out of traffic jams all having an input.

In short, the technical became intertwined with the social.

The quotation goes further than Latour, however, suggesting that the process of public

engagement is to bewelcomed, even if it does subvert ‘the whole foundations on which you


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stand’. In so doing, it raises a potential dilemma. Working with fellow professionals, either

in similar or different disciplines, can be identity-reinforcing through mutual professional

respect, as with the Arup engineers above. It was also a feature of the municipal

partnerships where working collaboratively as professionals enabled mutual respect,

dialogue and exploration of options. Professional-to-professional engagement can,

therefore, enable a virtuous circle of self-identity enhancement and shared experience.

Public engagement, however, according to the above engineer might lead to self-

questioning of professional identity, which by the same token could be problematic for

positive, collaborative relations. I return to this aspect below.

5.4 Practical Application

Unsurprisingly, the engineers were enthused by practical application. Within the municipal

partnerships, this was most explicitly expressed by the Ugandan engineers and associated

professionals who, under normal circumstances, were practice-starved because of scant

resources to do anything. Partnership projects camewith donor funds that enabled practical

application on environmental health-related issues.

The Arup engineers generally extolled the satisfaction gained from practical application

and especially its products, which appeared to have a positive reinforcing effect on identity

and hence motivation. One commented on the engineer’s ability to ‘transform a vision into

something real’; another on ‘designing things that can be built’; a third on the satisfaction

of ‘seeing a building or an idea when it’s finished’ and a fourth ‘seeing the end product of

something you’ve helped to create’. There is a message here for those who analyse

development practice mainly in terms of process and neglect products.

Arup engineers also put a premium on design. Again, this is unsurprising as Arup

describes itself as a ‘global design and business consulting firm’ (Arup, 2007b). Some of

the comments were of a general nature, such as design as: taking ideas and creating

solutions; unlocking opportunities and making a difference. Others referred to design

creativity through combining ‘art and maths’ or an interest in both ‘science and art’. The

combination of form and function through design was also extolled, with form being about

aesthetics and appearance, but sometimes was about the elegance of the function.

The association, throughout the Arup engineer sense-making, of design with creativity, the

acknowledgement of form as well as function and the inter-relation of art and science or

mathematics, take us beyond what is normally considered to be practical application in

development. It can undoubtedly be argued that this is because the Arup statements were not

made with reference to a Development (big ‘D’) context. Such contexts—for example,

enactment with limited resources of a community water supply by the municipal partnership

engineers—may not be conducive to design creativity in the visible, iconic sense that was

implied by the Arup engineers, which may in turn be an issue for positive self-identity.

Normatively, this suggests the need to enhance the status of the undoubted invisible design

that goes into a complex socio-technical system such as a southern community water project.

But, even with design conceptions which might not equate to the criteria of the northern

canon, satisfaction and identity enhancement can be gained from the social impact rather

than the product itself. For example, two Ugandan municipal environmental health

engineers and their UK counterparts of our study designed a storm-water drain in the

central district of Iganga, a town in Eastern Uganda. It involved basic surveying and

calculations of water flow from rainfall data, which determine the gradient and drain


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748 G. Wilson

volume. An issue between the Ugandan and UK engineers as towhether the drain should be

open or closed was resolved in favour of the Ugandans whowanted it open. They needed to

have easy access to unblock it periodically after siltation resulting from heavy rainfall. To

the eye, this is just an open drain that collects rain water, but to one of the UK engineers:

It was a public health aim. The day I knew [the storm-drain] was working, there had

been a rainstorm.Wewent down and saw someone I knowwhoworks for the Council

but also runs a drug store in the evenings [in the area of the project]. He said it was

working well, mosquitoes were very reduced. He said that without prompting. When

you have seen mothers with dying babies in their arms at the council clinic, if you can

do something with a crude, simple channel, all to the good.

5.5 Learning

Apart from an explicit reference by one person to ‘always learning new things’, this was

largely implicit among the Arup engineers where the very form of their ‘self-portraits’

required reflection, and learning appeared to be assumed in everything they said they do.

With the UK/Uganda municipal engineers learning was more to the fore, albeit

conceptualised usually as prior experience and feedback. Thus some UK engineers

expressed disappointment at lack of learning from the projects in Uganda, because of poor

communication when they returned the UK. One UK engineer expressed the importance of

experiential knowledge as follows: ‘Any practising engineer will tell you that what is

written in books and manuals is only a small part of the job. The rest is down to experience.’

6 CONCLUSION: FROM ENGINEERS MAKING SENSE TO MAKING

SENSE OF DEVELOPMENT

This is not a paper that seeks to play down or undermine in any way the explanatory power

of political economy frameworks. Development, however, is about change and aspiration.

As action it is an invention of the future through positive actions in the present. This draws

us towards a consideration of agents of change, both social and individual.

The engineers in this study have not claimed to discover the future. They have, however,

offered a vision of inventing it through their values, creativity, enactment and critical

reflection which they combine in virtuous circles, sometimes in difficult circumstances, to

form a ‘can do’ mindset. In a real sense they are already makers and shapers beyond their

technical skills to execute. For this reason alone an exploratory study has proved useful.

Moreover, in an agency conceptualisation of development practice where there are

multiple stakeholders, with no stakeholder having an a priori privileged ontology, these

engineers have illustrated the importance of constructing and maintaining a positive self-

identity. They thus extend the reflections of interviewees in Robbins’ (2007) study who

were distancing their roles as reflexive engineers working in the South from an unattractive

stereotype—the ‘traditional’ engineer of the literature which associates positive self-

identity with self-importance, arrogance and power-seeking. Such distancing is

understandable, but the present study suggests that this is no reason for jettisoning

self-identity, the desire for which acts as a powerful incentive, but to associate it with a

different group of words that are motivational—‘can do’, professional challenge, creativity

and first principles. The trick then is to associate building positive self-identity with desired


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behaviours in development interventions, such as respect for the other actors and their

knowledges in these invariably multi-stakeholder settings.

The engineers of this study in fact put a premium on working with other professionals,

where reinforcement of positive self-identity through mutual respect appears to be a

driving force. What seems to matter is not shared meanings, or ontologies necessarily, but

shared experiences in ‘doing’ together (Weick, 1995: 188–9). From these shared

experiences the ‘glue’ that holds everything together (Weick, 1995), possibly what

Habermas (quoted in Fischer, 2003:199) calls a background consensus, can develop.

The largely untested issue remains the extent to which mutual respect of different

identities and the gaining of shared experience can be extended to engagements between

professionals and non-professionals. I suggested above that this will be problematic if it

undermines positive self-identity. Robbins (2007) for example has reported negative

consequences of engagement between northern engineers and southern publics which has

resulted in arrogance towards local people. If, however, shared experience and mutual

respect can evolve, we can start to think of new, powerful coalitions of ‘professional’ and

‘lay’, and when we think of power we can also think of reframing the dominant structures

of society. As Weick (2001: 467) himself argues, large consequences can flow from small

actions when people change the only thing they can change: their own actions.

What then does this exploratory study add to the current epistemological conception of

technology’s role in development—as a knowledge system among many knowledge

systems where the challenge is to find synergy? The following are hypotheses, including

some qualifiers that have also emerged. They require testing:

1. A

Cop

‘technological’ knowledge system has something distinctive to offer beyond the

technical expertise of execution. Fundamentally, this is a ‘can do’ mindset that is based

on creativity, enactment and learning.

2. B
y extension, other knowledge systems will have equally distinctive things to offer.
Mutual respect between the agents within different knowledge systems and enhancing

their positive self-identities are pre-conditions for finding synergy. This is relatively

easy to achieve between engineers and professionals from other disciplines. It is

potentially problematic between engineers and publics where the very fact of their

engagement might undermine positive self-identity.

3. T
here is a dialectical relationship between shared experience and creating knowledge
synergies.

4. S
hared experience involves joint, ongoing enactment and learning through reflection.
As technological agents, engineers have a mindset that is particularly suited to these

mechanisms (see point 1 above).

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DOI: 10.1002/jid

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