Being Political in the Global: How engineers accommodate, resist, and experience ambiguity towards globalization

Corporations, governments, and the engineers they hire face increasing challenges in the global economy such as mobility of capital and labor, organizational re-structuring across national boundaries, development and implementation of more efficient production and manufacturing practices, among others. Yet we know very little about how engineers understand and experience globalization, and how globalization impacts their education, hiring, daily practices, and designs. In this paper, I outline a theoretical and methodological framework to analyze the impact of globalization on the education, hiring, practices, and designs of engineers in aerospace industries in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Next, I present preliminary ethnographic data that shows how engineers in different US corporate locations view and experience organizational change as one of the features of globalization. Illustrating the differences among engineers’ experiences could help upcoming generations of engineering students and professionals understand ways in which they might experience globalization in the workplace. I conclude the paper by making recommendations to engineering educators on educational experiences that might help future engineers deal with the ambiguities that globalization brings upon the workplace.