Conflicts between Faith, Tenuous Engineering Ethics, Culture, and Workplace Norms

About Conflicts between Faith, Tenuous Engineering Ethics, Culture, and Workplace Norms

Abstract

Engineering practice is regulated in many countries around the world and engineers are held to very high standards. In the United States, engineering students learn some of these guidelines of practice in school and must then improve their knowledge of and adhere to them as practicing engineers. Depending on the project location, local guidelines, and other challenges the project poses, engineers who are adherents of a particular religion can experience multiple conflicts of interest. Faith or a personal belief system may lie in irresolute contrast with questionable cultural beliefs, overtly orncovertly corrupt business norms and practices, and ambiguous, arbitrary or seemingly non-existent guidelines of practice. Even where local ethical codes exist, their foundations and enforcement system may be tenuous, or the local laws may be deliberately bypassed to facilitate graft. Whether they are a fresh graduate with an idealistic notion of their new role in the workplace or an experienced project manager, each Christian engineer must confront these issues and ultimately seek to resolve them with their profession’s tenets and personal faith in order to be effective on the job. This paper details the experiences of a young Christian and fresh engineering graduate born outside the United States and working in his first roles in civil engineering practice. Qualitative and quantitative information was used to depict the extent to which local guidelines conformed with or deviated from those set by a renowned body like the American Society of Civil Engineers. As an interesting parallel observation, personal accounts and experiences of other engineer co-workers who are adherents of another faith were sought and found to markedly agree in some cases – and disagree in others – with the experience of the Christian engineer. The work experiences were with both local and foreign-owned firms working on similar projects in the same country but there appeared to be similar conflicts between personal faith, ethics, and local business norms experienced while working at each. This suggests some sort of ‘cultural acclimatization’ where expatriate firms with otherwise strict codes of practice back in their home countries become witting or unwitting accomplices in questionable practices overseas. Some lessons learned here could help prepare (i) Christian engineering firms and engineers for such conflicts of interest in the line of duty (ii) engineering educators at Christian institutions to emphasize integration of faith with not just learning but practice.