READ THIS AND CHANGE THE WAY YOU FEEL ABOUT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

The paper is concerned with bridging the interdisciplinary divide betw een the technical and social aspects in the enterprise of software eng ineering. We do this by developing a postmodernist perspective on soft ware engineering, disputing the notion of a grand narrative of softwar e engineering (that is, an exclusive and embracing account of software engineering as a technical, rational project) by offering a series of accounts of a key meeting in a software project. These accounts both trade-off and disrupt a technical, rational narrative and indicate tha t the current situation in software engineering is one of stasis. Howe ver, our analysis indicates also a potential for diversity in software engineering with the valorization of differences, pluralities and het erogeneities at the expense of grand theory.