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Empowering Engineering Students in Ethical Risk Management: An Experimental Study

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. This organization sets the national academic standards for engineering education in order to license a graduate student as a professional engineer.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for research support provided by the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture du Québec (FRQSC) (Grant No. 185554). We are also very grateful for the useful and relevant comments made by the editor and the anonymous reviewers of Science and Engineering Ethics. We would finally like to thank others anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, HEC Montreal, Montreal, QC, H3T 2B1, Canada

    Yoann Guntzburger & Thierry C. Pauchant

  2. Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, H3T 1J4, Canada

    Philippe A. Tanguy

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  1. Yoann Guntzburger
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  2. Thierry C. Pauchant
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  3. Philippe A. Tanguy
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Correspondence to Yoann Guntzburger.

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Guntzburger, Y., Pauchant, T.C. & Tanguy, P.A. Empowering Engineering Students in Ethical Risk Management: An Experimental Study. Sci Eng Ethics 25, 911–937 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-018-0044-2

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