Recruiting First Year Engineering Undergraduates

This paper presents findings of three surveys conducted with first year students in the Faculty of Engineering in the Dublin Institute of Technology. It presents evidence on the reasons students study engineering, their sources of information on higher education programmes and the people who influence their decision to do engineering. It shows there are gaps in the students’ knowledge of their programmes and also between their expectations and their experience of their course. Some proposed areas of action are identified to increase both recruitment and retention. It is argued that projecting an image of engineering as a creative activity would help in addressing recruitment and retention issues

The New Engineer: Between Employability and Social Responsibility

The reasons behind the demand for what is sometimes called the New Engineer are critically examined and it is argued that a focus on employability alone is not sufficient to prepare socially responsible engineers. By examining issues around work organisation and sustainability it is proposed that engineers need to understand the wider social context in which they work. It is argued that the focus of ethics education should be broadened to focus on the social structure and the way it both enables and constrains socially responsible conduct. There is a call to refocus engineers’ attitudes towards the systems of regulation so they see them not only as constraints but as potential enablers supporting socially responsible engineering

Engineering Ethics: Ontology and Politics

Ontology...acts as both gatekeeper and bouncer for methodology” (Archer 1995: 22). This exploratory paper, through a focus on the relationship between structure and agency, examines the underlying social ontologies informing the teaching, and researching of the teaching, of engineering ethics. It argues that current approaches are deficient and that Critical Realism can provide the basis for a more robust and inclusive research agenda for understanding engineering practice and the teaching of engineering ethics

Recruitment and Retention: the Role of the Public Image of Engineering

This paper presents findings of three surveys conducted with first year students in the Faculty of Engineering in the Dublin Institute of Technology. It focuses on their motivation for studying engineering and the people who influenced the decision to do engineering. It shows there are gaps in the students’ knowledge of their programmes and also between their expectations and their experience of their course. Some proposed areas of action are identified to increase both recruitment and retention. It is argued that projecting an image of engineering as a creative activity would help in addressing recruitment and retention issues

A Critical Realist Approach to Engineering Ethics

This paper is focused on the teaching of engineering ethics (EE). Through a focus on safety and the lens of what sociologists call the agency/ structure relationship it examimes various approaches to this teaching. Drawing on Critical Realism it argues there are deficiencies in both the dominant approach and a number of proposed alternatives as they suffer from various forms of conflationism . By drawing on Critical Realism (CR) a more robust agenda for teaching engineering ethics can be developed. It is argued that CR offers a basis for understanding the range of factors which lead to accidents and disasters. It allows for a fuller consideration of agency/structure relations and the importance of changing the contexts in which engineers work in order to allow them to hold paramount the health, safety and welfare of the public

Towards an Integrated Approach to Engineering Ethics

There is an increasing diversity in approaches to teaching engineering ethics due to increasing dissatisfaction with the dominant approach which uses case studies focused on moral dilemmas confronting individual engineers. There has been a demand for a greater consideration of the organisational and social context in which engineers work and for a shift in focus from micro ethics issues concerning individuals to macro issues of concern to the engineering profession. Further, there has been a demand that engineers focus on societal decision making about technology and their role in policy development. Drawing on the work of the American sociologist George Ritzer, which focuses on micro/macro integration and the subjective and objective dimensions of sociological analysis, this paper provides a framework for understanding different approaches to engineering ethics. In moving towards an integrated approach, it is argued that a key issue confronting engineers is how to change the economic and social context in which they work so that it enables rather than constrains the development of sustainable engineering solutions. It is also argued that an integrated approach should focus on integrating the different levels of analysis into accounts of ethical issues

Engineering Ethics: Ontology and Politics

“Ontology...acts as both gatekeeper and bouncer for methodology” (Archer 1995: 22). This exploratory paper, through a focus on the relationship between structure and agency, examines the underlying social ontologies informing the teaching, and researching of the teaching, of engineering ethics. It argues that current approaches are deficient and that Critical Realism can provide the basis for a more robust and inclusive research agenda for understanding engineering practice and the teaching of engineering ethics