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Ethical Risk Management Education in Engineering: A Systematic Review

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, the term risk management refers to the process of risk analysis (identification, estimation and evaluation) as well as activities managing this process (planning, controlling, administering, etc.). See Frosdick (1997) for an explanation of the difference between management of risk (risk analysis) and risk management.

  2. The impact factor is usually used as a proxy of the importance of a journal in a specific field, while the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) measures its prestige and the h-index, its productivity (see, for example, Bornmann et al. 2012 for details).

  3. Articles in which keywords of ethics or risk management are mentioned but with another meaning (ex. “the risk of a student to fail an ethics course”, “with their grade at risk”, “it is the ethical duty of the university to assure the safety of students”, etc.).

  4. Those data were gathered from the EM-DAT database, available online (see Guha-Sapir et al. 2015).

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Acknowledgments

This research has received funding from the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture du Québec (FRQSC). We are very grateful for their financial support. We are also very grateful for the useful and relevant comments made by the editor and the four anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Yoann Guntzburger & Thierry C. Pauchant

  2. Chemical Engineering Department, 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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Correspondence to Yoann Guntzburger.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 References of papers focusing on risk management issues and coupling ethical concepts
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Table 6 References of papers focusing on ethics issues and coupling risk management concepts
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Guntzburger, Y., Pauchant, T.C. & Tanguy, P.A. Ethical Risk Management Education in Engineering: A Systematic Review. Sci Eng Ethics 23, 323–350 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-016-9777-y

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