2017_EJRNL_PP_JESSICA_M__SMITH_1.pdf
Terbatas Suharsiyah
» ITB
Terbatas Suharsiyah
» ITB
The mining and energy industries present unique challenges to engineers,
who must navigate sometimes competing responsibilities and codes of conduct,
such as personal senses of right and wrong, professional ethics codes, and their
employers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. Corporate social
responsibility (CSR) is the current dominant framework used by industry to conceptualize firms’ responsibilities to their stakeholders, yet has it plays a relatively
minor role in engineering ethics education. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary pedagogical intervention in a petroleum engineering seminar that
sought to better prepare engineering undergraduate students to critically appraise the
strengths and limitations of CSR as an approach to reconciling the interests of
industry and communities. We find that as a result of the curricular interventions,
engineering students were able to expand their knowledge of the social, rather than
simply environmental and economic dimensions of CSR. They remained hesitant,
however, in identifying the links between those social aspects of CSR and their
actual engineering work. The study suggests that CSR may be a fruitful arena from
which to illustrate the profoundly sociotechnical dimensions of the engineering
challenges relevant to students’ future careers.