The Field of Technology in Sweden: The Historical Take-Off of the Engineering Professions

Glenn Sjöstrand

doi:10.7577/pp.555

Abstract

Although the engineering profession has been called “the failed profession” owing to its lack of social closure, engineers have been successful in claiming their area of expertise and specialized knowledge as legitimate areas of research, knowledge, and intervention. In this article, the historical development of engineering professions in Sweden is used as a case of professional development. With the use of primary statistical sources and secondary historical sources, I endeavor to explain engineers’ professional development via coinciding factors such as the expansion and scientific content of lower and higher engineering education, the struggle for power in interest groups and unions, and engineers’ position in what seems to be an ever-increasingly diversified labor market. I argue that the professionalization process for Swedish engineers has fluctuated and that more than one professional take-off (two or even three) has occurred.

Highlights

The engineering profession has been called “the failed profession” owing to its lack of social closure, engineers have been successful in claiming their area of expertise and specialized knowledge as legitimate areas of research, knowledge, and intervention
With the use of primary statistical sources of labor market activity, the number of students enrolled in engineering, the number of diplomas issued, and the synthesis of secondary historical data, Sweden is presented as a case of professionalization processes
In Germany, academic studies with theoretical content constituted a part of the arguments for professionalization, but the engineers’ relationships with practical knowledge and with bureaucracies put them in an awkward position; that is, they were stuck between a twofold ideal of autonomy within the industry and a position within the state bureaucracy where they did not fit in (Gispen, 1989)

Summary

Conceptual notes

Vincenti states that “engineering refers to the practice of organizing the design, construction and operation of any artifice which transforms the physical world around us to meet some recognized need” (1990, p. 6). The technological field includes struggles and cooperation between professions—for instance, in the division of labor between different engineers (with different specialties and levels of education) and between engineers and other occupations such as technicians (see the article by Brante in this issue of Professions & Professionalism). The engineering professions’ qualitative take-off relates to the professions’ increased social or economic status and importance in society based on cognitive development (i.e., the combination of practical and theoretical knowledge), new scientific paradigms, the institutionalization of engineering education, or the breakthrough of inventions (Brante, 2010a). The fourth factor involves the effects of the position of engineers in what seems to be an ever-increasingly diversified labor market, perhaps especially important at the time of the third Industrial Revolution at the end of the 1900s when new information technologies transform the world (Schön, 2012). Other factors that help explain the professionalization of engineering (but are not covered in this brief article) include the change in specific work content and the institutional and organizational context in which various engineers perform their work

Early history

The expansion of lower and higher engineering education

Findings

Concluding discussion