Author Meets the Critics – Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility by Jessica Smith
The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. Extracting Accountability investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, Smith finds that the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability — to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors —they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others. Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers practicing in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics— from critics of their industry to their own friends and families.
Presenter:
Jessica Smith: Associate Professor, Engineering, Design, and Society Division; Director, Humanitarian Engineering Graduate Programs, Colorado School of Mines
Critics:
Sean Field, University of St. Andrews
Angela Bielefeldt, University of Colorado, Boulder
Elaine Englehardt, Utah Valley University
Moderator:
John Impagliazzo, Hofstra University