[INES Announce] Announcing new paper on Ethics Codes - Relevant for studies of professionalism, classism, and sustainability in engineering cultures

[Mallory James]

Dear colleagues via INES-Announce,

I consider Engineering Studies a great field in which to investigate the
larger human question: how do we live with the *idea(l)s of
"professionalism" *that we have created in our societies, and the problems
that can follow from what these ideals enact in practice?

In the upcoming *Engineering Studies *journal issue, I made a small
historically-grounded argument that speaks to this question:

I described how gatekeeping the edges of 'engineering' is discursively
presented as an 'ethical' imperative in Australian engineering ethics
codes. In order to describe all the different kinds of social goods evoked
in the archival codes of ethics, I needed to conceptually bridge two
empirical interests: how 'ethics' are discursively constructed within the
privileged sphere of well-paid and socially-legitimated 'skilled work' in
engineering; and how inclusion or exclusion from that privileged sphere is
constructed, including the political question of who gets to decide whom to
exclude. As I wrote on p.3, my article observes "how institutional
languages of idealism relate to institutional projects of
gatekeeping−mindful that such languages and projects not only transform
cultural and political meanings, but also affect class reproduction."
Hence, in order to account for the material, I ended up speaking about
professionalism in relation to the threat of *classism*.

I also appreciate Engineering Studies as a field in which we get to think
through a hugely practical human problem: *technological harms, slow
violence, and the myriad damages* that can accompany engineering projects.
Where do they come from, and can they be stopped?

This was heavy on my mind as I took up the empirical interest in how ethics
codes construct "responsible engineering."  As paraphrased from my
article's introduction, p.2, I was curious how it has been possible for
engineers to be BOTH ethical and responsible (according to their codes of
ethics) AND ALSO agents of violence (as we empirically see around the
world.) How is this paradox sustained over time, without resolution?

The answer the Australian data posed to this was that in the codes, ethical
behavior has historically tended to be presented in terms of behavior
towards clients and fellow engineers, including preserving peers'
reputations and what could be broadly called fair competition practices
(see Table 1). The requirement to not use membership titles or definitions
wrongly functionally consolidated 'gatekeeping' authority within the
centralized national professional association, which from 1966 to the
present has also emphasized *recognizing the limits of one's expertise* as
an ethical mandate. It is possible to infer that the relatively recent and
increasingly complex task of meeting social demands for "sustainability"
has entered into a cultural interaction with the long-running themes of
'Practicing only within one’s areas of competence' and preserving peers'
reputations, to discourage Australian engineers from speaking out in public
against engineering projects they perceive as harmful--because perhaps they
would not feel confident that they would have all the information or 'areas
of competence' to make a competent judgment, and perhaps they would harm
specific peer engineers by doing so--which itself, seen against the arc of
this specific archival history, would be an ethical failure.

Read the full paper open-access here, courtesy of the LMU library:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19378629.2025.2556378

Thank you to all of the colleagues who responded to and engaged with this
work at last year's INES meeting.  I hope to continue meeting with you
about topics of classism, sustainability, engineering-based violence, and
the complexity of 'inclusion' into professional practices and spheres that
are themselves contested.  If you are working or have worked on similar
interests, please feel free to write and plan a Zoom coffee break with me
for social networking, or directly send me your writings as well, or both.

best,

Mallory (she/her)


Dr. Mallory James
Gastwissenschaftlerin | Visiting Scientist
Empirische Kulturwissenschaft und Europäische Ethnologie | European
Ethnology and Cultural Analysis
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München | LMU Munich

Associate Editor, *IEEE Technology and Society Magazine*
IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology


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