This project ethnographically investigated how engineers understood and practiced corporate social responsibility in their work in the mining and oil and gas industries, and then used those findings to enhance undergraduate engineering curricula at four universities with programs focused on natural resource development: Colorado School of Mines, Virginia Tech, Marietta College, and South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is highly contested and had played a relatively minor role in the field of engineering ethics. We used CSR as an entry point to introduce students to pressing macroethical questions about the public accountabilities of business. Over the duration of the project, we integrated a critical take on CSR into more than 30 courses in mining, petroleum, geological, and electrical engineering and offered a standalone upper-division social science elective on CSR, designed specifically for engineers. Our focused teaching reached approximately 1500 students, and the class projects and assignments we developed remain in the classes beyond the project duration. We facilitated institutional transformation at Mines, including the creation of a new undergraduate minor (Leadership in Social Responsibility) and the founding of an alumni interest group centered on social responsibility. We offered workshops for over 300 engineering educators in the US, Canada, Peru, and an online webinar. The project provided professional development for one postdoc, two graduate students, and five undergraduates.

The main ethnographic findings were published by PI Smith in the book Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility, which was published open access by The MIT Press in 2021. Drawing from 75 interviews, participant observation, and archival research, the book argues that the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. The book demonstrates that the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability?to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others. Given these competing accountabilities, engineers pragmatically focused on activities that created economic value for both their employers and some sectors of the public. 

The project also supported the 2016 Energy Ethics conference at the University of St Andrews (Scotland), which convened students and faculty from the US and around the world. Two special issues, co-edited by Smith and Mette High, were published from that conference: one in Energy Research and Social Science and one in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. We propose a capacious approach to studying energy ethics that opens up energy dilemmas to ethnographic inquiry, critically examining how our interlocutors themselves consider the rightness and wrongness of energy resources and the societal infrastructures of which they form a part. As an example of this research, Smith theorized an underlying ethic of material provisioning that animates how engineers and technicians who work in the mining and oil and gas industries understand and value their work.

The findings from the ethnographic research ? as well as the professional networks we developed ? enriched our work in engineering classrooms. A team of about a dozen faculty integrated social scientific perspectives on CSR into a range of required courses in mining, petroleum, geological, and electrical engineers. We developed a survey to assess how our teaching affected students? knowledge, skills, and attitudes about CSR, engineering ethics, and their own careers. Students took the survey once at the beginning of the semester and once at the end. Over the duration of the project, over 800 students completed both surveys and gave informed consent to participate in the research.

We published the results of our engineering education research in the journals Science & Engineering Ethics, Journal of Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, and the annual proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education conference. We found that as a result of the course activities, students were more able to identify ?social? performance as a key dimension of engineering responsibility beyond economics and environment. Students also broadened their views of legitimate stakeholders to include activists opposed to their industries. Reflecting the underlying pragmatism we identified among practicing engineers, students expressed a clear preference for ?compromise? solutions ? e.g. local hiring rather than redesigning infrastructure to accommodate community concerns. We found that including practicing engineers in learning activities resulted in more transformative learning and that specialized electives, such as the elective course dedicated to CSR, draw students who already demonstrate deep commitments to social responsibility. This signals the importance of continued collaborations between social scientists and engineers. Finally, student-directed research compared faculty and student perceptions of CSR instruction and created a framework to classify and assess CSR teaching strategies (integrated vs separate and implicit vs explicit).

Last Modified: 10/03/2021
Modified by: Jessica M Smith