Paper short abstract:

This paper is an experiment in re-configuring the conditions of collaboration with industry for anthropologists. Conceived as a joint project by the two authors—one an anthropologist, the other a civil engineer—we propose interdisciplinary knowledge production as a mode in consulting for industry.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is part of a research plan that aims to understand engineering projects as temporally specific communities of architects, engineers, project manager, contractors and workers. The authors—one an anthropologist and the other a civil engineer—engage with the ethics of collaboration with industry by re-imagining it as an exercise in interdisciplinary knowledge production. We propose that such commitment to interdsiciplinarity may be one way to address the spectre of danger that collaboration with industry evokes. Our work brings together empirical data and literature in civil engineering together with ethnographic methods and anthropological literature on community, work, and fragmentation. We work through a single case-study involving the construction of a large dormitory on the campus of IIT Madras, where we both serve as faculty. There are three frameworks through which we locate our interventions. For the first, we work within questions of flexibility to understand how, why and when communication structures break down even as key personnel continue to move the work forward despite crises. Secondly, we ask as to how projects are organized in their capacity to give individuals both responsibility and power and whether one can probe structures to understand feelings such as power or powerlessness, boredom, ennui and hope. Lastly, we examine the roles of stakeholders within a project in relation to their own sense of worth as contributors to a larger cause or motive. Together, these questions allow us to think of collaboration between knowledge systems even in the seemingly dangerous company of industry.