Professional standards: Can they shape practice in an international context?

Science and Engineering Ethics

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 303-314

  Weil, Vivian ^a  

^a ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

Engineering codes; Engineering standards; International professional standards

Indexed keywords

EID: 3242851888     PISSN: 13533452     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11948-998-0022-1     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. Graham, L. (1993) The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
2. From recent research by a Russian historian of science and engineering, we learn that in Russia in the 19th century, there were some excellent engineering schools, among them, the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg, Tarasova, V. (1998) "Engineering Education in Russia," English translation from an unpublished paper.
3. Graham, The Ghost of the Engineer, p. 14.
4. 'Taylorism' is a term for a scheme that introduced time-and-motion studies as a basis for revolutionizing machine-shop practice in the U.S. in the early decades of this century. The originator of this scheme. Frederick Winslow Taylor, also "rationalized" workers' use of machinery and tools, in a system that treated workers themselves like machines. In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, putting into practice his principle of production flow. The tasks to be performed in automobile production were divided into a series of small pieces, arranged in order. Requiring workers with minimum skills, the pieces consisted of repetitive tasks and made workers interchangeable. Soviet industrializers were attracted to "Fordizm" and "Taylorizm."
5. Gigantism refers to the policy of promoting and carrying out large-scale, costly projects with high visibility.
6. John G. Burke provided this history in 1966 "Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power," Technology and Culture 7/1: 1-23. The article won the Payson Usher prize of the Society for the History of Technology.
7. Ibid.
8. Shapiro, S. (1997) Degrees of Freedom: The Interaction of Standards of Practice and Engineering Judgement, Science, Technology, and Human Values 22/3 (Summer), pp. 286-316.
9. This information was confirmed in conversation with Sidney Guralnick. Professor of Civil Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology.
10. Samuel Florman provides a glimpse of the debate in "Moral Blueprints," Harper's Magazine, October, 1978.
11. Davis, M. (1998) "Reflections on the History' of Engineering in the United States: A Preface to Engineering Ethics," Chapter 2, Thinking Like An Engineer, Oxford University Press, UK.
12. In 1994 and 1995, a cooperative effort by engineers representing professional bodies in Canada, the United States, and Mexico yielded agreement on common standards for engineering practice to be recognized under the NAFTA treaty. Professor Jimmy Smith. Director of the Murdough Center of Texas Tech University, spearheaded the project and included two philosophers, this author and Michael Davis, as ethics specialists among the advisors for the project.
13. The investigators included this author. Michael Davis, and a computer scientist, Ilene Burnstein of Illinois Institute of Technology. As of this writing, the process of achieving agreement on the code is not complete.
14. I owe this analysis to a suggestion made by my colleague Warren Schmaus.