An Intersubjective Analysis of Engineering Leadership Across Organizational Locations: Implications for Higher Education

Engineering leadership education has become increasingly popular over the past decade in response to national calls for educational change. Despite the growing popularity of the movement, however, reform efforts continue to be piecemeal in their delivery, driven largely by the priorities of program leaders who established them (Graham, 2012). If we as engineering educators wish to more systematically develop leadership skills in our students, we should begin by empirically examining and defining our phenomenon of interest: engineering leadership. Our article takes up this challenge by investigating how 82 engineers in five organizationally distinct roles define leadership and how their respective insights are shaped by their diverse organizational locations. After weaving together the perspectives of engineers in industry, human resource professionals, entrepreneurs, politicians and interns, we propose a poly-vocal definition of engineering leadership and identify practical implications for engineering leadership educators.   En réponse aux appels à réformer le système de l’éducation, la formation de leaders en génie a gagné en popularité au cours des dix dernières années. Malgré la popularité croissante de ce mouvement, les réformes demeurent partiales et suivent largement les priorités des directeurs de programmes qui les mettent en place (Graham, 2012). Si, en tant que formateurs d’ingénieurs, nous souhaitons perfectionner systématiquement les compétences en leadership de nos étudiants, il nous faut commencer par une analyse empirique qui permette de définir précisément notre objet, soit le leadership en génie. Notre article relève le défi en analysant les façons dont 82 ingénieurs occupant cinq rôles distincts dans une organisation définissent le leadership, et les façons dont leurs positions institutionnelles établissent leurs perspectives. En tenant compte des perspectives d’ingénieurs de l’industrie, de professionnels des ressources humaines, d’entrepreneurs, de politiciens et de stagiaires, nous proposons une définition plurivoque du leadership en génie, et nous en identifions les implications pratiques pour les éducateurs du domaine

What Makes Merrimack Students Stand Out? A Focus on Success!

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Taking the engineering path to business leadership and entrepreneurial success in Canada and USA

A cross-sectional longitudinal study of Canadian graduate engineers yielded unexpected percentages of engineers gravitating towards entrepreneurial opportunities. The aggregate of the classes of 1954, 1959, and 1964 demonstrate entrepreneurial / intrapreneurial outcomes at a rate that is many times higher than the general population. The rate is well over double the rate cited previously for engineers intending to pursue entrepreneurial outlets (Tremblay et al. 1998; Tremblay et al. 2007). This paper explores possible reasons for those findings. Existing literature is combined with a crosssectional, longitudinal study of graduate engineers. Interpretive insight is offered from a separate exploratory study investigating the value of knowledge. Seeking to understand the high incidence of engineers gravitating to entrepreneurial opportunities, we refer to a separate study exploring potential knowledge; how knowledge is valued, and how the value of knowledge is shared between the organization and the employee. We present a framework for knowledge to be applied, or potential. Firms that saw potential knowledge in some employees recognized and captured its economic value. Instead of sharing the value generated by the knowledge with the individual, the firms indicated increasing the work load and adding responsibilities to the individual. We advance a proposition that the selection and training of engineers emphasizes potential knowledge, which is a form of intellectual property; a resource with economic value. As a valuable resource, one can expect the individual to seek a reasonable return on this asset. If the firm appropriates all of the returns, it is reasonable to expect the individual to seek a higher personal return from his or her intellectual property. Those with potential knowledge may seek alternative opportunities to capture some of the value of their intellectual property for themselves, and thereby pursue entrepreneurial outlets even if they had not initially intended or desired to do so

Teaching Through the Lens of Humane Education in U.S. Schools

Humane education (HE) is a specialized niche in higher education and adult learning. HE provides a curricular framework positioning environmental ethics, animal protection, human rights, media literacy, culture, and change processes as the nexus for understanding and inspiring social change. Research-derived experiences illuminating how educators conceptualize and implement HE in U.S. schools are absent from the scholarly literature. Facing this gap, practitioners and administrators of HE programs cannot access nor apply research-derived practices to inform instruction. To address this gap, a conceptual framework was advanced weaving together HE teaching experience, Freirean philosophy, hyphenated selves, reflection-in-action, transformative learning, and transformative education to explore and understand what it means to be a practitioner teaching through the lens of HE in U.S. primary, secondary, and post secondary classrooms. A qualitative, multi case study was designed wherein purposeful and maximum variation sampling resulted in the recruitment of 9 practitioners working in Kindergarten to post secondary contexts. Eight practitioners were alumni of HE programming, and 1 practitioner engaged self-study of HE pedagogy. Each bounded system included the HE practitioner, his or her classroom context, and local school community. Interviews, document review, within-case analysis, and cross-case analysis resulted in key themes illuminating the need to design a comprehensive system of field-based learning and ongoing professional support to benefit HE practitioners. A policy recommendation is provided to shape programming, policy development, and resource allocation to improve and sustain HE as a field of study and professional practice

Writing in Marketing Practice: Voice and Textual Identity

The aim of this thesis was to explore the writing experiences of individuals engaged in the marketing of a university. The rationale for doing so was to take a lens to the 'inside reality' (Cook, 2006) of the discipline as social practice and reveal aspects of the backstage work that produces the externally-facing texts that make and monitor the identity of the organisation. From a critical perspective, this is important because it helps to illuminate how market making is shaped by the discursive practices of its actors. A university is an appropriate site for a field study of this nature because the global higher education sector is increasingly subject to a marketisation agenda which works to re-position knowledge production as a commodity and applies the logic and rules of market competition to what previously was primarily part of public sector provision. The thesis is based on the findings from a six-month linguistic ethnographic field study that investigated the experiences of nine marketing practitioners who wrote regularly in their jobs. Linguistic ethnography is an interpretive approach to socio-linguistic research that studies situated practices from the perspective of the actors involved. It is aligned with social constructionism which holds that social realities and identities are created and maintained in communication with others and not in pre-existing structures (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). The study took a cyclical 'talk around texts' (Lillis, 2008) approach to exploring marketing writing as social practice in the relational exchanges between stakeholders. The findings conclude that marketing writing emerges through a dynamic interplay of four textual selves. In view of the humanistic management movement that calls for a re-thinking of business practice, I argue that it is time for a marketing literacy that recognises the relational and responsible aspects of marketing writing, as well as its agentic possibilities