Petroleum engineering students' views of corporate social responsibility

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 policies. This paper reports on preliminary research that seeks, first, to understand the relationship between engineering and corporate social responsibility (CSR), the current dominant framework used by industry to conceptualize firms' responsibilities to their stakeholders; and second, 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 share results from an assessment of a pilot interdisciplinary pedagogical intervention in a required petroleum engineering course at the Colorado School of Mines. It 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.