Abstract
Scholarly work usually characterizes engineers as politically and socially conservative individuals; instruments of the expansion of capitalism and neoliberalism. It also portrays them as supporters of both the State and the big corporations that employ them. However, counterexamples have also been documented historically in which engineers have supported social justice and sided in favor of labor and other social movements, sometimes even placing themselves in open confrontation against capital and the State. This chapter relies on ethnographic analysis to document the work of a group of engineers in Colombia who decided to create a space of exception to neoliberalism in the form of a Non-Governmental Engineering Organization (NGEO). These engineers had found that running their own NGEO provided them with some degrees of freedom to pursue social justice goals in their engineering work in ways not usually found in the corporate or neoliberal governmental worlds. However, these opportunities do not come without outstanding challenges, such as funding dependencies from a neoliberal government, which create contradictions that may hinder the engineers’ pursue of social justice goals.
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Notes
- 1.
A Colombian system and computer engineer is normally trained in the basic engineering core, computer science, computer systems engineering, software engineering, organizational informatics, and a few elective courses, which may include liberal arts, social science, and humanities content.
- 2.
Neoliberal policies in Latin America were designed not only to shrink the State and make it “more efficient,” but also to shift the balance of power in society from governments and the public sector to private-public “networks.” Within neoliberal development circles this kind of institutional reform came eventually to be identified with “good governance” (UNCGG 1995; Launay 2005; Kurbalija and Gelbstein 2005).
- 3.
According to their founding members, they named their NGEO “Somos Más” because it connotes their interest in networking NGOs and in helping the nonprofit sector to know itself and keep growing.
- 4.
The nonprofit sector in Colombia is also known as the “Third Sector,” in reference to the other two sectors: the for-profit private sector and the public sector (Villar 2001).
- 5.
http://v2v.somosmas.org/v2v.php, Accessed on: April 12, 2012.
- 6.
Bogota is the capital city of Colombia. It is also the biggest city in the country with 7.4 million inhabitants in 2005 (DANE 2005).
- 7.
This argument mirrors previous Marxist discussions about the privileged place of engineers in class struggles, in which they occupy an intermediary position between capital and labor but in which they ultimately side with capitalist interests to enjoy the benefits of future careers in management (Noble 1977, 1984).
- 8.
A more elaborated discussion and evidence of these identity ruptures can be found in Arias-Hernandez (2008).
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Arias-Hernandez, R. (2013). Exceptional Engineering: Challenges and Opportunities for Socially Just Engineering in Non-governmental Organizations in Colombia. In: Lucena, J. (eds) Engineering Education for Social Justice. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6350-0_11
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