Negotiating Engineering and Activism: French Environmentalist Engineers Conforming to, Shifting, and Overstepping Professional Boundaries

Abstract

This paper explores three different forms of negotiation implemented by environmentalist engineers between their professional work and their environmental activism. These engineers, members of environmentalist organizations, appropriate in different ways this conceptual professional boundary that separates and opposes the social worlds of engineering and activism. The article draws from narrative interviews with 50 environmentalist engineers that focused on the dynamics of these negotiations and their effects on biographical trajectories. The process of conforming, shifting or overstepping the boundary between profession and activism is linked to the framing of environmental causes. The precarious balances these engineers strike between work and activism thus depend on three factors: the emergence (or not) of a professional reflexivity, the adoption (or not) of a political interpretation and the reaction of hierarchical superiors and company management.