The Transformation of the Engineer Profession in the Global and Finantial Capitalism

The central objective of the paper would be to study two major schools of production engineering, in other words, schools that stand out as the first line of professional forming in Brazil. For this reason, we chose to study the production engineers trained at UFSCar and manufacturing engineers trained at the Polytechnic School of São Paulo (USP). After that, the idea of also studying a private university in order to locate the differences between the formation of this group in public universities and one private university. So we decided to choose a privative university of second row in the State of São Paulo.

            The second phase of the work would be to seek the former graduate student, from the beginning of the course of production engineering, so we could draw a chronological overview of how the choices of these students would change from the 1970s to the present day. After these former students answer the close questionnaire, although some choose most important in each area (those who have chosen the  financial consulting area and some who have chosen the area of the financial market) we made some qualitative interviews. Once we have choosen our sample, we could start other qualitative interviews with teachers of the production engineering department (possible deviant choices and most recurrent areas in manufacturing engineering). This additional sample would bring us some important information that was not collected in the close questionnaires.

            Our methodology and research procedure started when we worked with some theoretical issues concerning the approximation or distance of a legitimate culture, which is why we will worked with some concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Boudon raising our key questions. After the concept of lifting we worked with economic markers of respondents comparing them among the students from the  three universities studied in order to verify the economic markers (capital) and others that are associated with it such as social origin to verify the positioning of respondents engineers in the social space. Finally, we seek to ascertain what were the career choices of dreams and real career choices of students (their real occupation in organizations) from three universities, as well as analyze the differences and similarities between these positions. Our methodological choice was by quantitative analysis based on statistical technique of multiple correspondence analysis.

            In this sense, we can show and demonstrate graphically how it forms and conforms a possible social world of these production engineers. It can  observed  not only engineers who are still in the universities, but also those who have already graduated and are already situated in  brazilian organizations and institutions.

            In short terms, our main aim with this work is: mapping the life trajectories of a professional group, reflect better on macro issues, revealing what is behind this new financial and global capitalism and at the same time, characterized as occurring the intra and extra field fights, disputes within the system of domination in Brazil.

Key-words: global domination; field of dispute; profession and finantial capitalism.