Interprofessional Relations and The Emergence of A New Profession: Software Engineering in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada

AbstractThis article explores the conditions under which interprofessional relations may be characterized by conflict and/or cooperation through a case study of the rise of a software engineering (SWE) profession in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Analysis of professional journal publications produced by the primary computing organizations in all three countries reveals that the development of a SWE profession in the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent, the United States, has been a collaborative project pursued by engineering and computing organizations. In contrast, the development of SWE in Canada has been characterized by intense interprofessional conflict. The investigation suggests that interprofessional conflict may be mitigated when professionalizing groups seeking to lay claim to the same jurisdiction are similar in terms of their organizational size, outlook, and regulatory status. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI would like to thank Erin Demaiter and Rob Downie for their research assistance, and Julie McMullin, Peter Kivisto, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.NOTESNotes1 By legislative status, I mean whether the professions are state regulated, as well as the nature and the extent of professional privileges that state legislation grants them. Regulatory status is important because it is through state regulation that professions come to acquire power (CitationFreidson 2001:128).2 CitationAbbott (1988) did not specify how conflict among professions might differ from conflict among other organized "expert" occupations. Given this ambiguity, I have decided to use the term "interprofessional conflict" when discussing relationships among software engineering, computing and engineering, even though the claims of each group to professional status may be debated in some contexts.3 That interprofessional cooperation occurs is, at times, implied in Abbott's model, but the incidences and contexts of cooperation are not explored.4 Article topics included the following: president's letters, editorials, discussions of education programs, curriculum development, credentials, accreditation, organizational histories, organizational change, working experiences, occupations, and the careers of computing workers, the impact of technology and computing practice on society, public perceptions of computing, ethics, working relations, the state of the computing/IT profession and computing knowledge, professional membership, government relations, and legal issues.5 Approximately, 83 articles were taken from BCS journals, 125 (plus 17 Web publications) from CIPS journals, and 147 articles and 210 letters from the Communications of the ACM.6 After this date, the journal was succeeded by the IEE Transactions on Software Engineering (published jointly with the BCS). With the change, the journal became more technical in focus, and hence, no longer carried many articles related to professional issues. The BCS's more technical Computer Journal was also perused to glean additional material, especially for the years 1989 to 1994 for which it proved too difficult to access the Computer Bulletin.7 CIPS was largely silent on software engineering as a discipline and occupation until the late 1990s when Canadian engineers claimed software engineering education as solely their domain. At this time, CIPS began to advance its own claims to the field. CIPS's writings on SWE, then, are largely a product of interprofessional conflict, and have been generated in response to claims advanced by engineers.8 Computer groups were formed within the American Institute of Electric Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers in the 1940s. In the early 1960s, these two organizations merged to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE); at this time, their computer groups merged to form the IEEE-CS.9 These international differences in professional activity in computing reflect somewhat differing approaches to professionalism in the three countries more generally. In particular, the United States has been historically more opposed to monopolies and restrictions on practice than the United Kingdom or Canada.10 As CitationKraft (1977) argues, programming has been rationalized and routinized, prompting some deskilling. This routinization itself may have encouraged skilled software workers to embrace a new title for their work.11 For instance, the two had joined together, with other societies, to form American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS), the body that represented computing workers internationally. They had also jointly organized conferences for decades, had been two of the founding organizations of ICCP, a body providing credentials to IT workers upon examination, and had joined together to form the CSAB to accredit university computer science programs.12 The development of the SWEBOK was led by a team at the University of Quebec at Montreal, but involved consultation with thousands of software practitioners in 42 countries (CitationAbran et al. 2004).13 Here, the change in accreditation policies is significant. CSAB's current association with ABET should ensure that computer science SWE programs meet engineering license requirements.14 It is only recently that Canadian occupational classifications have a category for SWE.15 Unlike in the United States, licensing is mandatory for engineers in Canada.16 In this endeavor, they have had limited success. Engineers in Quebec recently won a court battle against Microsoft for the latter's illegal use of the term engineer in its certification program; however, the battle was at best a moral one, as the penalty was only a $1,000 fine (CitationSchick 2004). A recent Alberta case against an Apple Canada-certified systems engineer was dismissed by the court when it deemed the defendant "presented no injury to the public" (CitationAschaiek 2004:15).