Empowering Engineering Students in Ethical Risk Management: An Experimental Study.

The complexity of industrial reality, the plurality of legitimate perspectives on risks and the role of emotions in decision-making raise important ethical issues in risk management that are usually overlooked in engineering. Using a questionnaire answered by 200 engineering students from a major engineering school in Canada, the purpose of this study was to assess how their training has influenced their perceptions toward these issues. While our results challenge the stereotypical portrait of the engineer, they also suggest that the current engineering education might fail to empower engineers to engage in ethical risk management. We therefore propose an active-learning method to help in this matter. Carried out through workshops with 34 students in chemical engineering, the effectiveness of this method has been evaluated using group interviews and questionnaires. Our results suggest that such an approach is effective, at least in the short run, to motivate students to engage in ethical risk management and to trigger reflectivity on what it means to be an engineer today.

Ethical Risk Management Education in Engineering: A Systematic Review.

Risk management is certainly one of the most important professional responsibilities of an engineer. As such, this activity needs to be combined with complex ethical reflections, and this requirement should therefore be explicitly integrated in engineering education. In this article, we analyse how this nexus between ethics and risk management is expressed in the engineering education research literature. It was done by reviewing 135 articles published between 1980 and March 1, 2016. These articles have been selected from 21 major journals that specialize in engineering education, engineering ethics and ethics education. Our review suggests that risk management is mostly used as an anecdote or an example when addressing ethics issues in engineering education. Further, it is perceived as an ethical duty or requirement, achieved through rational and technical methods. However, a small number of publications do offer some critical analyses of ethics education in engineering and their implications for ethical risk and safety management. Therefore, we argue in this article that the link between risk management and ethics should be further developed in engineering education in order to promote the progressive change toward more socially and environmentally responsible engineering practices. Several research trends and issues are also identified and discussed in order to support the engineering education community in this project.

O indivíduo na organização: dimensões esquecidas / The individual in the organization: dimensions forgotten

Aborda a informação e a comunicação nas organizações bem como os signos e símbolos utilizados, no contexto das relações pessoais