Bridging the Unspannable Chasm: Qualitative Knowledge Construction for Engineering Systems

The understanding of engineering systems demands diverse knowledge. Managers must consider the social and technical, the observable and unobservable, the concrete and abstract, and the animate and inanimate to successfully describe and purposively shape the system. Therefore, the complexity of engineering systems requires hybrid approaches for constructing our knowledge of such systems. This research attempts to bridge what has frequently been described and experienced as an unspannable chasm between the methods of social science and engineering science.