Christelle Didier

Fascinating and compelling in equal measure this volume presents a critical examination of the multilayered relationships between engineering and business. In so doing the study also stimulates ethical reflection on how these relationships either enhance or inhibit strategies to address vital issues of our time. In the context of geopolitical, economic, and environmental tendencies the authors explore the world that we should want to create and the role of the engineer and the business manager in this endeavor. Throughout this volume the authors identify periods of alignment and periods of tension between engineering and business. They look at focal points of the engineering-business nexus related to the development of capitalism. The book explores past and present movements to reshape, reform, or reject this nexus. The volume is informed by questions of importance for industry as well as for higher education. These are: What kinds of conflict arise for engineers in their attempts to straddle both professional and organizational commitments? How should professionals be managed to avoid a clash of managerial and professional cultures? How do engineers create value in firms and corporations? What kinds of tension exist between higher education and industry? What challenges does the neoliberal entrepreneurial university pose for management, faculty, students, society, and industry? Should engineering graduates be ready for work, and can they possibly be? What kinds of business issues are reflected in engineering education curricula, and for what purpose? Is there a limit to the degree of business hybridization in engineering degree programs, and if so, what would be the criterion for its definition? Is there a place in engineering education curricula for reflective critique of assumptions related to business and economic thinking? One ideal of management and control comes to the fore as the Anthropocene - the world transformed into an engineered artefact which includes human existence. The volume raises the question as to how engineering and business together should be considered, given the fact that the current engineering-business nexus remains embedded within an economic model of continual growth. By addressing macro-level issues such as energy policy, sustainable development, globalization, and social justice this study will both help create awareness and stimulate development of self-knowledge among practitioners, educators, and students thereby ultimately addressing the need for better informed citizens to safeguard planet Earth as a human life supporting system.

This volume consists of chapters derived from the best papers submitted to the 2023 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET) meeting that took place in April 2023 at Delft University of Technology. Topics and fields covered within the volume include applied ethics, meta-ethics, value theory, education, responsible innovation, political philosophy and value-sensitive design. The contributors present research that addresses the challenges of engineering in a changing world. This text is of interest to students and researchers working in the fields of engineering and philosophy.

When looking at how values have evolved it is hard to maintain a neutral view of cultural differences and history, without falling into relativism. Values change, it’s undeniable. They are limited by time and space, as much as the societies and individuals in which they appear. If universalism exists, i.e., a universal conception of truth, beauty or morality, it is at best a beautiful but impossible ideal, at worse a dangerous illusion that leads democracies into fascism and despotism. Yet, it seems unacceptable to say that gender equity became a matter of justice, or that racism was good then and is now bad. They were important, good, or bad before they were accepted as such. By rejecting universalism, we are exposed to another danger: relativism. Are values the expression of what is valued, or what is valuable? Can we objectively know something about values?

Today, the German concept of Bildung has become visible as a threshold concept in science and environmental studies where critical thinking, societal values, ethics, and social responsibility have been introduced as new knowledge domains (Sjöström et al. 2017). In this paper we set out to discuss whether rethinking engineering professionalism through the concept of Bildung would be beneficial for addressing technological issues as well as broader socially pertinent challenges on a global scale such as global warming, pandemics, decreasing biodiversity, increasing economic and social polarization, racism, information- and cybercrimes, etc. by which society is presently confronted. Dealing with such an array of challenges will have bearings on understandings of the very telos of engineering (Aristotle 2000, Buch 2022). Rethinking the telos of engineering has profound implications. Ultimately it is a struggle over knowledge as such endeavour will do away with the technical core/nontechnical periphery distinction in traditional engineering epistemology. The paper starts with a reflection on the present configuration of higher education and the priority given to STEM fields. The concept of Bildung and understandings of Bildung usually rise to prominence when a given configuration of the educational system is no longer able to deliver on its promises (Christensen 2019). Bildung can therefore be seen as a counter and problematizing concept vis-à-vis the present configuration of the educational system. As regards engineering, it is a heterogeneous socio-technical enterprise in which challenges and solutions are distributed across social, material, economic, political, and technical domains. Various understandings of “Bildung in Engineering Education” have been identified: 1. Wilhelm von Humboldt ́s classical Bildung, 2. Anglo-American liberal education, 3. Scandinavian folk-Bildung, 4. Democratic education, and 5. Critical-hermeneutical Bildung (Sjöström et al. 2017). Considering the negotiated nature of engineering solutions, together with the heterogeneous character of its practices, we argued that option 4 has specific relevance. The paper thus points to John Dewey’s ideas of democratic education and unfolds elements in Dewey’s philosophy that are helpful for a contemporary reconstruction of Bildung as democratic education (Dewey 2011). In so doing it is necessary to address the very purpose of engineering – its telos. Considering the challenges facing humankind in the Anthropocene era, this telos will have to be reconsidered. We use Dewey’s pragmatist lens to do so and argue that Engineering should be reconsidered as a problem-solving discipline that seeks to ameliorate living conditions. In the conclusion, we consider possible obstacles for reconstructing engineering along the lines of Bildung through democratic education. References Aristotle (2009). The Nicomachean Ethics, OUP Oxford. Buch, Anders (2022). The Need for Recovery of Engineering. In: Christensen, Steen Hyldgaard et al. (eds.) Engineering, Social Sciences, and the Humanities: Have their Conversations Come of Age? Springer Nature. Christensen, Steen Hyldgaard (2019). Costs and Benefits of Commercializing Teaching, Research, and Service in the American Corporatized University. In: Christensen, Steen Hyldgaard et al (eds.) The Engineering-Business Nexus: Symbiosis, Tension and Co-evolution. Springer Nature. Dewey, John. (2011) Democracy and Education, Simon & Brown. Sjöström et al. (2017). Use of the concept of Bildung in the international science education literature, its potential, and implications for teaching and learning, Studies in Science Education, 53(2).

The distinction between professions and occupations has been a highly controversial statement in the academic literature since its emergence. Many scholars have taken it as a fact strengthened (reflected) by the common usage. Others, aware of the difficulties of this distinction have been defining and redefining its borders theoretically. Others, who have found this distinction irrelevant or biased, have considered it as the hallmark of US cultural imperialism or as a means to hide the protectionist attitude of some privileged occupational groups behind a virtuous project (the « higher aims » of « professionalism »). Many contemporary discussions in the U.S. about engineering and business ethics take the concept of profession as central to the debate. Michael Davis aims to found engineering ethics « everywhere », by enlarging the concept of profession to engineers « everywhere », i.e. beyond the cultural and linguistic specific US context. Rakesh Khurana in turn whose goal is to re-moralize business, wants to make business a true profession, as the founders of the first U.S. MBA aimed at. Between the obviousness surrounding the concept and idea of profession and the rejection of any kind of relevance, the author of this chapter looks for a third way. She invites to replace the (Anglo-American) distinction between profession and occupation in a larger context, through a socio-historical investigation into the construction of several professional models which have structured western Europe since the Middle Age, thereby contributing to open new paths to the cross-cultural scholarly discussions about engineering and business ethics.

The aim of this first chapter is to introduce the current Philosophy of Engineering and Technology volume Engineering and Changing Values, and explain its origin, originality, and purpose. While growing out of a meeting of the forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET) held in Delft in 2023, its final form is the fruit of a singular editorial, selection and support effort. This introductory chapter aims to highlight its singularity, which is based as much on the theme addressed as on the geographical, cultural, and disciplinary diversities that characterize the group of contributors, and the editorial team, which is in the image of the forum from which it comes. This chapter also describes the general philosophy of the book and the four thematic sections that make it up: ethics, justice, epistemology, and theoretical approaches to value change in design. This introduction also provides an opportunity to thank the many people who helped make this project a reality.

Contrary to many other countries, in France, engineering education remains attractive. Paradoxically, French students do not seem to be motivated by the engineering profession and many graduates seem to have become engineers “by accident”. The outcome of our research is that engineering students are “pushed” by an invisible parental and social pressure. The most successful ones end up in a very few prestigious schools, which are supposed to open the doors of the higher management positions in big private companies and public administration, the great majority in a school they have hardly heard about before the “concours”, with little motivation for applied science, hardly any vocation for engineering. This work is at the crossroad of two developing approaches within the fields of educational sciences and sociology: the choice to study successful students belonging to the upper or upper middle class which are less investigated than lower classes, and the choice to adopt a qualitative approach, while most researches about orientation are based on wide quantitative surveys. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the construction of the engineers’ culture and ethos, through an analysis of the socialization process from the engineering students’ point of view.

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. Whether and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this debate is given comprehensive coverage – presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. Using context as “bridge” this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe – both East and West – with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia.

This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice.

In France, some institutions seem to call for the engineer’s sense of social responsibility. However, this call is scarcely heard. Still, engineering students have been given the opportunity to gain a general education through courses in literature, law, economics, since the nineteenth century. But, such courses have long been offered only in the top ranked engineering schools. In this paper, we intend to show that the wish to increase engineering students’ social responsibility is an old concern. We also aim at highlighting some macro social factors which shaped the answer to the call for social responsibility in the French engineering “Grandes Ecoles”. In the first part, we provide an overview of the scarce attention given to the engineering curriculum in the scholarly literature in France. In the second part, we analyse one century of discourses about the definition of the “complete engineer” and the consequent role of non technical education. In the third part, we focus on the characteristics of the corpus which has been institutionalized. Our main finding is that despite the many changes which occurred in engineering education during one century, the “other formation” remains grounded on a non academic “way of knowing”, and aims at increasing the reputation of the schools, more than enhancing engineering students’ social awareness.