An Engineering Dilemma: Sustainability in the Eyes of Future Technology Professionals

Abstract

The ability to design technological solutions that address sustainability is considered pivotal to the future of the planet and its people. As technology professionals engineers are expected to play an important role in sustaining society. The present article aims at exploring sustainability concepts of newly enrolled engineering students in Denmark. Their understandings of sustainability and the role they ascribe to sustainability in their future professional practice is investigated by means of a critical discourse analysis including metaphor analysis and semiotic analysis. The sustainability construal is considered to delimit possible ways of dealing with the concept in practice along the engineering education pathway and in professional problem solving. Five different metaphors used by the engineering students to illustrate sustainability are identified, and their different connotative and interpretive implications are discussed. It is found that sustainability represents a dilemma to the engineering students that situates them in a tension between their technology fascination and the blame they find that technological progress bears. Their sustainability descriptions are collected as part of a survey containing among other questions one open-ended, qualitative question on sustainability. The survey covers an entire year group of Danish engineering students in the first month of their degree study.

How Does Sustainability Become Professionally Relevant? Exploring the Role of Sustainability Conceptions in First Year Students

“…Subjects of the empirical studies had to be university students. We included n = 17 studies with the following disciplinary backgrounds: management and business education [49][50][51][52], engineering education [24,[53][54][55], teacher training [56][57][58], tourism [29,59], as well as five studies with the overall aim of integrating ESD into HEIs [25,60,61].…”

“…Third, the majority of studies draws on the traditional conception with three or four dimensions of sustainability. Some studies, however, distinguish between up to seven different sustainability dimensions [25,[55][56][57]59]. A common distinction is made between naïve, simple or pre-structural conceptions on the one hand, and broader, more sophisticated, multi-structural or interconnected conceptions on the other.…”

“…An exception is the study by Carmargo and Gretzel [59] report 15% holistic views among their tourism students in Latin America. Further, freshmen's conceptions seem to be more simplistic, in particular prior to their studies or without being exposed to interdisciplinary sustainability courses [51,52,55].…”

A Social Licence for Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage: How Engineers and Managers Describe Community Relations

“…Many terms exist to describe how managers and engineers can embed a socio-technical systems approach into practice in order to address the community-industry relationship. The terms that social researchers have observed in use include: corporate social responsibility, social responsibility, sustainability, sustainable development, accountability, ascribed obligations, professional responsibility, ethical practice, public participation, triple bottom line, social capital and social contracts (Busby and Coeckelbergh 2003;Haase 2013;Kemp, Owen, and van de Graaff 2012;Lucena and Schneider 2008;Vanasupa, Chen, and Slivovsky 2006). Each of these terms has a unique meaning and a particular, yet contested, sphere of applicability.…”

“…In addition, the particular topics of SLO and good community relations generally, as conceptualised by technical professionals, seem to have been largely overlooked by the majority of CCS researchers. The most closely related studies examine how sustainability is conceptualised by Danish (Haase 2013) and Australian (Azapagic, Perdan, and Shallcross 2005;Carew and Mitchell 2002) engineering students. For the most part, existing empirical studies of how technical professionals relate to "publics" or "communities" have been either subcomponents of larger ethnographic projects (e.g.…”