Extracting Accountability

Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility

by Jessica M. Smith

$65.00 Paperback
eBook

328 pp., 6 x 9 in, 20 figures

Paperback
9780262542166
Published: September 28, 2021
Publisher: The MIT Press

$65.00

eBook
9780262362429
Published: September 28, 2021
Publisher: The MIT Press

$64.99

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Open Access

How engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries attempt to reconcile competing domains of public accountability.

The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. In Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, she finds the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability—to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others.

Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics—from critics of their industry to their own friends and families. She shows how the social license to operate and an underlying pragmatism lead engineers to ask how resource production can be done responsibly rather than whether it should be done at all. She analyzes the liminality of engineering consultants, who experienced greater professional autonomy but often felt hamstrung when positioned as outsiders. Finally, she explores how critical participation in engineering education can nurture new accountabilities and chart more sustainable resource futures.

Jessica M. Smith is Associate Professor in the Engineering, Design, and Society Division of the Colorado School of Mines, where she is also Director of Humanitarian Engineering Graduate Programs.

“In this empathetic and incisive ethnography, Jessica Smith demonstrates that we cannot hope to comprehend some of the most pressing issues of our time—including corporate ethics, accountability, and agency—without nuanced attention to the lives and labors of engineers in the extractive industry.”
Douglas Rogers, Professor of Anthropology, Yale University; author of The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism

“There is no better study of the ground-level, life-lived complications for engineers as they work to transform the world in which we all have a stake. What Jessica Smith extracts from the complex world of mining throws light across the engineering profession as well as into the problematics of any engaged scholarship today.”
Carl Mitcham, Renmin University of China and Colorado School of Mines

“Perhaps more than ever, we live in the time of the engineer. The profession is nevertheless strikingly absent from humanistic inquiry writ large. Jessica M. Smith's valuable attempt to take seriously 'the everyday lives of engineers,' then, is a critical intervention.”
H-Net Reviews