Towards a Theory of Software Engineering Professionalism in Postcolonial African Contexts

Software engineering professionalism has been theorised predominantly from Western institutional and cultural contexts, leaving the formation, norms, and contradictions of software engineering professional identity in postcolonial African societies theoretically unexplored. This dissertation develops a theory of software engineering professionalism in postcolonial African contexts, using Nigeria as a primary empirical site and contributing original theoretical work to both software engineering studies and postcolonial science and technology studies. A critical theory research methodology combines a historical analysis of computing and software engineering profession formation in Nigeria from the 1960s to the present, a critical discourse analysis of professional body communications from the Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria (CPN), and 50 biographical interviews with software engineers at varying career stages across six geopolitical zones. The dissertation applies postcolonial theory, specifically the concepts of hybridity, mimicry, and subaltern knowledge, to analyse how Nigerian software engineers navigate professional identity between globally circulating engineering norms and local institutional realities. Four theoretical contributions are made: the Professionalisation Paradox theory (postcolonial engineers simultaneously inhabit global professional standards and locally exclusionary institutional structures), the Colonial Standards Legacy framework (historical analysis of how British computing education shaped CPN professional regulation), the Bricolage Professionalism construct (the creativity-driven informal standard building in absence of strong institutional scaffolding), and the Digital Sovereignty Aspiration model (the emerging professional identity politics of African software ownership). Keywords: professionalism, postcolonial theory, software engineering, Nigeria, professional identity