Article ID: CBB871313365

Socialization through stories of disaster in engineering laboratories (December 2019)

unapi

Wylie, Caitlin Donahue (Author)


Social Studies of Science
Volume: 49
Issue: 6
Pages: 817-838


Publication Date: December 2019
Edition Details: Themed Issue: Academic Lives and Cultures
Language: English

The initiation of novices into research communities relies on the communication of tacit knowledge, behavioral norms and moral values. Much of this instruction happens informally, as messages subtly embedded in everyday interactions. Through participant-observation and interviews, I investigate how engineers socialize future engineers. Specifically, I study how undergraduate students who work in an engineering laboratory learn their research community’s social and technical norms. I found that a key method of conveying knowledge about social behavior and technical practices is the narration of the experience of mistakes and failures. As a powerful tool of socialization, these ‘disaster stories’ contain messages of self-deprecation, humility, teamwork and mutual learning. They are most often told by the principal investigator or a graduate student to an undergraduate student, thus generously offering novices the opportunity to learn vicariously through more experienced engineers’ errors. Disaster stories can reduce hierarchy, normalize learning through mistakes and build relationships among workers through the sharing of humbling personal struggles. The stories promote collaboration, a sense of belonging and the value of continuous learning for all the community’s members. They demonstrate the power of storytelling in the acquisition of tacit social and technical knowledge.

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Associated with

Article Sergio Sismondo (December 2019) Academic Lives and Cultures. Social Studies of Science (pp. 813-816). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB871313365/

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Authors & Contributors
Lehr, Jane L.
Wendy Newstetter
Megan E. Tomko
William Barr II
Stephen Secules
Adam Kirn
Concepts
Education, engineering
Engineering
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Engineers
Technology and gender
Work environment
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
Places
United States
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