title: Engineering Students' Views of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Case Study from Petroleum Engineering.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Colorado School of Mines, 1500 Illinois St, Golden, CO, 80401, USA. jmsmith@mines.edu.
authors.forename: Jessica M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Colorado School of Mines, 1500 Illinois St, Golden, CO, 80401, USA.
authors.forename: Carrie J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: McClelland
authors.affiliation: Colorado School of Mines, 1500 Illinois St, Golden, CO, 80401, USA.
authors.forename: Nicole M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D003479:Curriculum; D004738:Engineering / Q000193:education / Q000941:ethics*; D040861:Ethics, Business; D004995:Ethics, Professional; D019652:Extraction and Processing Industry / Q000941:ethics*; D005260:Female; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010578:Petroleum; D012941:Social Responsibility; D013334:Students
chemical_list: D010578:Petroleum
keywords: Corporate social responsibility; Engineering ethics; Pedagogical strategies; Petroleum engineering; Student learning