Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Technology
• Technology: incomplete knowledge to achieve things “unnatural” → all technology
eventually become obsolete.
• Technological system: Implementation → artefacts + people + admin (manage)
• Innovation: incomplete knowledge increases → change in technology ← how do we
evaluate?
• Engineers are casual agents of such a change.
Professionals
• Profession: self-regulation, allow innovation, legal regulation is inadequate
• engineers act deliberately:
• change the way peoples live
• change social practices (direct or indirect)
• characteristic issues → ethics (difficult)
• confliction goal, aim
• imprecise definitions
• “arbitrary” assumption
• use of philosophical system
• virtue: honesty
• duties/responsibility: obligation
• utilitarianism: for the greatest benefit
• rights: basic human rights
• engineers → autonomous & responsible
• possible 'first principle' to guide an engineer's professional behaviour
• legalism
• obedience
• selfishness
• personal principles
• Use of professional standards (IEAust, IEEE) → code of ethics
• possible motive to conform to ethical principles
• fear of consequence
• religion
• loyalty
• altruism
• professional expectation
• implicit social contract: society trusts engineers to protect what society values
Code of Ethics
• for common good and shared value:
• ethical behaviour
• competent performance → act only in the area of the their competence
• innovative practice
• engineering excellence
• equality of opportunity
• social justice
• sustainable development
• place engineers responsibility for welfare, health and safety of community before their
responsibility to sectional and private interest.
• Engineers shall as with honour, integrity and dignity in order to merit the trust of the
community and professions.
• Act with equity without discrimination towards all of the community.
Sustainability ethics
• recognise the finite capacity of the environment
• recognise the rights of future generation, and no generation should increase its wealth
to the detriment of others.
Philosophical thinking
frameworks
• utilitarianism → producing result for achieving the most of good for the most of the
people
• Samaritanism → doing good that you do not have to do ↔ no duty, no obligation
• obligation → “I promise I will”, strong
• duty → weak than obligation
• social responsibility → duty with specific target
• heroism → self-sacrifice → whistle-blower
consequential (teleological)
• egoism → about oneself
• nationalism → about the nation
• epistemism → knowledge based
• utilitarianism → happiness, pleasure, welfare
non-consequential (deontological)
• duty
• what is right things to do
• social contract
• fairness
Immanuel Kant
duty as the basic moral feature
good will → duty
effective leadership
• it depends on leader: character, skill, competency
• it must match the current circumstances
• it depends on followers' needs, cultural expectation
• interaction and understanding of each others personality → limited by ethical
consideration
• it transforms goals/values of follower to different one.
Engineers leadership
• expert authority → do not move out side on expertise
• what is team
• flat structure
• self managed
• outcome focused (result driven)
• no one have all the skills
• creativity enhanced by interaction
effective team
• as established
• clear goal, desired by team, with time frame
• external support, resource
• competent team member
• as organised
• structure relevant to goal
• communication channel → agree and respect to each other
• individual responsibility
• standards
• as perform
• unity, morale
• active & positive leadership
• mutual accountability
• team commitment
Environmental problem
• resource scarcity → fossil fuels
• inter-generation equity → consideration for future generation
• intra-generation equity
engineers' responsibility
• engineers develop part of the solution → not to the whole problem
• avoid false claim
• truth → moral autonomy
• utilitarianism
• long term benefit (including future generation)
• respect for person
• virtue
• right
• duty
Activity week 4
Leadership and management → the balance between them
what is the characteristic of effective leadership
• well managed
• honest
• good communication
• set standard
• compassion
• goal driven
• responsible
how do you know it is effective
Choir, band or orchestra, who is leader, what dose leader do?
• The controller may not be leader
• the one who set the goals, plans, keep every one in sync
Leader
The essence of engineering is making trade-off between conflicting parameters. Improve in one
parameter can make another one worsens. As a engineer, we are trained to quantify the different
trade-off, draw some kind of cost/benefit curve, and make a rational choice based on our analysis.
Risk management
Activity week 6
Strategic goals and plans
• what is overall goal for a organisation
• what to do to achieve it (strategy)
strategic goals: accompanied by a “value statement”
• clear and concise → understood by everyone, memorable and inspirational
• worth doing → everyone wants to achieve it, become member's top priority
• feasible → sufficient skills, existing resource (consider the internal and external
constrains)
• measurable → knowing the progress of the task, feedback and review
• communicate with all stakeholders → internally and externally
what is the difference between missions and goals?
Activity week 7
Recommendation and feedback
leadership involves monitoring both internally and externally. Is it better to raise too many or
too few alarms?
Activity week 8
Technocratic decision
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) recently released suggestions about the
use of bands in the 3 to 300 GHz range of the electromagnetic spectrum. In turn, the Federal
Government has asked IEAust, as Australia’s professional body representing engineers, to
provide expert advice about uses of this part of the spectrum within Australia. The senior
decision-makers of IEAust has decided to establish the Advisory Committee on Technical
Issues in Spectral Use (ACTISU) to provide the formal response to government’s request. You
are a special working group that it established to determine how ACTISU should be
structured and the details of its task. Consider, amongst others, such questions as these. In
each case, be prepared to explain your decisions.
Sustainable development
Sustainable development is a way of using resources in order to maintain the growth
of the present economic and social state while preserving the environment and
causing minimal disruption to the present and future generations.
Technological fixes → seeks to reduce the effect of existing problems by other technology
Round circle phenomenon → when technological fixes are applied, this can pose new
environmental problems.
Clean Technology
Clean technology is the term used to describe technologies that do not pose any
environmental risks during its lifetime, as opposed to end-of-pipe technologies that
would require additional processes to deal with the wastes.
Sustainable engineering:
“Practices that promote environmental, social and economic sustainability through greater
resource efficiency, reduced pollution and consideration of the wider social impacts of new
technologies, processes and practises”
Environmental Justice
Study that attempts to document, prove or refute allegations a community or population is
suffering disproportionately as a result of the actions of another community.
Leadership
For any goal of sufficient complexity, no one individual possesses all of the skills or
knowledge necessary to achieve this goal. As such, cooperation between different
individuals is necessary in order to achieve goals. Leadership, then, can be defined as a
process of social influence in which one individual, the leader, assists a group of people
in the act of cooperating to achieve a common goal.
Strategic leadership
Strategic leadership is the component of leadership associated with long and medium
term strategy.
Strategic Planning
A strategic plan, in business, is a process for determining where an organization is
going over the next few years. Such plans are vital in business or charitable
organizations, and as such a number of formal methodologies for strategic planning
have been published in order to aid long range strategic planning.
B9 keyreading
Strategic Leadership & Ethics
Many public decisions have to rely on the expert advice to a certain extent.
• Different expert gives different advices and interpretations; it is not always easy for a
layman to decide which experts to believe
• People have a tendency to listen to the expert advice without any doubt because of the
experts’ authority.
• Not everybody has the time and energy to participate in every decision making and
often leave the decision to other people.
KS keyreading
Leadership & Teamwork
Technocratic
• Bases the risk on the technical process and is not always influenced by the general crowd and
the effects to society.
• Believes risk are measurable from scientific resources
• “nobody wants to substitute scientific knowledge with intuition”(Renn)
Democratic
• Democrats says that publics assessment of technology incorporates a larger number of
dimensions and concerns such as society’s ability to cope which are said to be ignored by
professional risk assessment.
• Believe in fairness and distribution of the risk and the benefits that it brings determines
whether the risk is sociably acceptable.
• Individual input -> the way individuals believe the risk and benefits are to be distributed
HG keyreading
Organizational Environment, Changing Economic Conditions and the Effective Supervision of
Technical Personnel:A Management Challenge
Organisational Structure:
There are two main types of organisational structures:
• Hierarchy:
• Established levels of management, centralised information system, emphasis
on local knowledge and skills
• Good for highly complex tasks and more stable conditions in the technology
environment
• Ideal for clear goals
• Organic:
• Ad-hoc centre of authority, lateral communications, expanded responsibility,
• commitment beyond technical definition
• Good for dynamic environment and enhances innovation and creativity.
• Compensates for lack of structure with higher levels of commitment, shared
• beliefs and information exchange
• Ideal for uncertain goals, and technical uncertainty.
Career Considerations:
To avoid technical obsolescence, engineers must constantly update their knowledge. There
are two main career paths for a maturing engineer, and each can cause stress in its own way:
• Specialising in a particular technical area
• Choosing a career in management
Compensation:
How to reward engineers work and creativity?
• Monetary compensation? This is only useful if the engineer values increased pay. One
paper argues that monetary rewards are unprofitable as technical achievements are
usually the result of teamwork and can lead to reduced cooperation, innovation as well
as divisiveness
• Potentially more appropriate forms of compensation: Job security, increased
autonomy, recognition, self-worth
Ko keyreading
Management & Leadership
• Strong leadership and strong management create the potential for conflict
• Both of leadership and management are needed if organisations are to prosper, to be
successful
1. Planning and budgeting: setting targets (short, mid and 1. Establishing direction: potentially very long term goals
long term) and establishing the necessary steps to meet along with strategies to achieve this vision
these targets 2. Aligning people: communicating this vision with key
2. Organising and staffing: structuring an organisation and people to create coalitions of people dedicated to its
setting jobs for meeting targets. Matching staff to these achievement
jobs based on expertise, and delegating responsibility of 3. Motivating and Inspiring: keeping people moving
duties. towards the goal despite major setbacks
3. Controlling and problem solving: monitoring work
completed versus schedules, and then planning how to
resolve problems (deviations from the plan) as they occur.
Difference
The difference in these two areas is seen in the outcome achieved. Management has the ability to produce consistency
with a degree of predictability and order. While leadership produces change (often dramatically), with the potential of
this change being very useful.
N3 keyreading
Skills and leadership
• Ethical theories help to identify the moral considerations that make up a dilemma. For
each of the ethical theories, we can look at the considerations from two different sides,
the public and the employer.
• Virtues – loyalty to employers and colleagues vs. loyalty to the public.
• Utilitarianism – safety of the public vs. economic benefits to the company.
• Duty – protect the public affected by your work vs. respecting management-
levels decisions.
• Rights – rights of the public to be protected vs. rights of management to have
their decisions respected.
• Ethical theories can give precisely what type of information is relevant to solving
moral dilemmas. E.g. All theories agree that potential harm to the public are urgently
relevant, and it is not right to only consider your company and the employer when
reaching a decision.
• The theories give a general priority of the obligation to protect the public due to the
rights concerning risks to people’s lives, the duties of engineers to protect the public,
and the comparison between death and risk compared to economic benefits. This view
though, does not always override all other obligations, but this obligation to the public
is most important to a professional engineer.
• They provide a systematic framework for moral reasoning and strengthen our ability
to reach a balanced and insightful judgement.
• Act Utilitarianism – engineers would need to act in ways to maximise the good
consequence for everyone affected by engineering projects and products.
• Rule Utilitarianism – engineers would need to act to rules that if widely followed
would produce the best consequences for everyone available.
• Duty – the obligations of the engineers come down to one or more of the basic
principles of duty, such as to show respect for people.
• Rights – engineer’s safety obligations are based on the requirement that professionals
respect the moral rights of those affected by their work.
• Basic rights imply everyone has a right not to be killed or put in danger by technological
products whose dangers are not obvious. This in turn implies a right to informed consent
when obtaining goods or services that may be dangerous
• These rights give place an obligation on those creating products or delivering services to
provide relevant safety information to those that would be affected. The nature of these
obligations are generally shaped by rights, creating a direct link between basic human rights
and the safety obligations of engineers (both as to what the obligations are, and how the
engineer obtains them).
MS4 keyreading
Commitment to safety
Risks
Acceptable Risk
William D. Rowe: “A risk is acceptable when those affected are generally no longer
apprehensive about it”. Apprehension depends on how the risk is perceived. This
perception is influenced by the following factors:
• Voluntarism and control
Knowledge of Risk
1. A product is safe if:
a. It is as safe as it possibly can be
b. It is the cheapest possible product
c. It meets the required safety limit according to regulations
d. It is used properly (i.e. The engineer has no role in ensuring safety)
e. A safe exit is provided
Uncertainties of Design
What is the most important purpose of an aeroplane?
• Maximise profits
• Highest return on investment
• Deliver people from one destination to another
• Ensure the safety of all participants using the aeroplane
Safe Exists
Whilst it is impossible to design a product that is completely safe, we have an ethical
responsibility to ensure:
1. The product fails safely
2. The product can be abandoned safely
3. The user can safely escape the product