Engineering Ethics Paper 4

O R I G I N A L P A P E R

An Engineering Dilemma: Sustainability in the Eyes of Future Technology Professionals

S. Haase

Received: 26 June 2012 / Accepted: 4 November 2012 / Published online: 30 November 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Abstract The ability to design technological solutions that address sustainability is considered pivotal to the future of the planet and its people. As technology

professionals engineers are expected to play an important role in sustaining society.

The present article aims at exploring sustainability concepts of newly enrolled

engineering students in Denmark. Their understandings of sustainability and the role

they ascribe to sustainability in their future professional practice is investigated by

means of a critical discourse analysis including metaphor analysis and semiotic

analysis. The sustainability construal is considered to delimit possible ways of

dealing with the concept in practice along the engineering education pathway and in

professional problem solving. Five different metaphors used by the engineering

students to illustrate sustainability are identified, and their different connotative and

interpretive implications are discussed. It is found that sustainability represents a

dilemma to the engineering students that situates them in a tension between their

technology fascination and the blame they find that technological progress bears.

Their sustainability descriptions are collected as part of a survey containing among

other questions one open-ended, qualitative question on sustainability. The survey

covers an entire year group of Danish engineering students in the first month of their

degree study.

Keywords Sustainability � Technology � Societal challenges � Qualitative analysis � Survey analysis

S. Haase (&) The Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, School of Business and Social

Sciences, Aarhus University, Finlandsgade 4, 8200 Aarhus, Denmark

e-mail: [email protected]

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Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:893–911

DOI 10.1007/s11948-012-9417-0

Introduction

One of the main prejudices about engineers—and a serious obstacle for young

people taking up the engineering profession—is that engineers pave the world

with asphalt, create pollution, and generally wreck the environment.

(Henriksen 2006, 44.)

Technology is often expected to hold the potential key to overcome—or at least

make bearable—a range of the environmental, social and economic issues that

humanity must tackle. The list of such societal challenges threatening the existence

of present societies, living conditions, and environment is long. Since the so-called

Brundtland report (United Nations 1987), the need to address these challenges

systematically and in international coordination has been on the public agenda.

(Lozano 2008; Carew and Mitchell 2002, 2008; Jamison 2012; UN 1987). The

balancing of different elements of sustainability and practical operationalisation of

the term into concrete action is not straight-forward, though. This makes

sustainability a highly contested concept (Gallie 1956; Connolly 1993). In this

article, the term is used in the widest possible way as encompassing the overall aims

of efforts to address societal challenges. No prior, theoretical definition of

sustainability is selected; focus here is instead on sustainability concepts of some

of the people that are often expected to play an important role for sustainable

development, namely future technology professionals (ABET 2004, 2006; Lehmann

et al. 2008; RAE 2005, 2007; Sheppard et al. 2008, 2009). The article seeks to

explore and map the empirical landscape of sustainability conceptions reported by

newly enrolled engineering students in Denmark.

An entire year group of engineering students in Denmark has been surveyed

during September 2010, and the responses to an open-ended question in the survey

serve as the empirical base for this article. The question reached more than 3,600

engineering students from 105 different engineering degree programmes. One-third

(1211) of the students decided to answer the open-ended question on sustainability. 1

The question formulation was ‘‘How would you characterise sustainability? Please

describe in your own words how you understand the concept’’.

Previous research often focuses on evaluations of outcome of specific course-

work on sustainability, life cycle assessment or related subjects (Carew and Mitchell

2002; Lehmann et al. 2008; Jamison and Mejlgaard 2009, 2010). Attempts have

been made to map and quantify the complexity of student understandings of

sustainability (Segalàs et al. 2008; Carew and Mitchell 2002; Lourdel et al. 2005),

and the taxonomy level of the understanding of the concept has been assessed

1 In total the survey response rate was 46 %, but with a somewhat skewed representation of different

engineering education institutions. This equally applies for the respondents to the open-ended question

where there is also an overrepresentation of men (3 percentagepoints in difference) as compared to the

total engineering student year group of which 24 % are women. The survey was administered as a

bilingual web-survey where non-Danish speakers could answer the English version of the survey. Unless

otherwise stated, quotations are translated from Danish to English. The survey was deployed as part of the

Programme of Research on Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education in Denmark funded

by the Strategic Research Council. The survey focused on the role of societal challenges in the nascent

professional identity of a year group of engineering students at all education institutions in Denmark.

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(Carew and Mitchell 2002). Azapagic et al. (2005) operationalise sustainability as

environmental sustainability and assess student knowledge about a range of specific

issues as environmental legislation and standards in their large-scale, international

survey. One example of an in depth analysis of student understandings is presented

by Kilgore et al. (2010) focusing on life cycle issues.

This article has an ambition of providing knowledge on the mental starting

position of future technology professionals in Denmark in terms of an in-depth

understanding of the sustainability concepts of engineering students at the very

beginning of their pathway to engineering. It will be investigated with an

explorative approach how these newly enrolled engineering students conceive of

sustainability and how they construe their future professional roles in relation to

sustainability, technology and nature.

Analytical Approach and Methods

A form of discourse analysis based on Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995, 2003) is used as

the analytical approach to interpret meaning from the descriptions that form the

empirical data. According to Fairclough, the use of language involves a passive role

restrained to refer to already established words, genres and discourses. It also

involves, though, an active, creative role of restructuring the language system and a

potential to challenge existing ways of using these words, genres and discourses.

Discursive practice is constituted and constituting at the same time (Fairclough 1989:

14, 23, 30ff, Fairclough 2003: 8, 22, 205ff). Here, Fairclough is on a par with

Giddens (1984) and his theory of structuration pinpointing the reciprocal interplay

between actors and structures characteristic of social practice. The focus on discourse

as text, discursive practice and social practice and the ambition of linking textual

analysis to social theory are among the particular assets of Fairclough’s critical

discourse analysis (CDA). The three dimensions of CDA are illustrated in Fig. 1.

Analysing text as discursive practice is difficult to distinguish from textual

analysis focusing on meaning (Fairclough 1992: 73ff) but in this case it involves the

fact that the texts are formulated as part of a survey that the engineering students

were confronted with in their capacity as engineering students at a specific

educational institution. This dimension is also considered a matter of critically

scrutinising consequences of the contingency of the processes in which the

responses were produced. This means that alternative or missing, potential

meanings and discourses are included in the analysis.

To Fairclough, the analysis of text as social practice is paramount because it

paves the way for his desire to contribute to ‘‘…emancipatory change’’ (Fairclough 2003: 209). In particular, the early works of Fairclough have highly political

objectives and a focus on hegemony, ideology and power structures invested in

discourse and social practice (Fairclough 1989, 1992). The ambition of this article is

less political, although a contribution to the qualification of the (engineering)

education system’s changes towards a higher degree of sustainability emphasis is

aspired to. At the level of social practice, the discourse analysis concerns

theoretically based discussion of the societal implications of the sustainability

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conceptions and the anticipated professional roles discursively constructed by these

future engineers. The explorative approach implies that theory was not à priori

selected but will be used to illuminate the results that emerge from the analysis. (See

also Fairclough 1989: 22.) Survey results are used in a similar manner.

The term discourse underlines—in contrast to ‘‘issue’’, for example—the role of

language in social practice and interaction. Discourse is understood as certain

structures or patterns of ways for language users to represent their understandings

(Fairclough 1992, 2003).

An order of discourse is considered a network of interconnected social practice in

terms of acts of language. Temporarily, they are relatively stable and represent the

socially structured conventions among possibilities of language usage (Fairclough

2003: 24, 220; Fairclough 1992: 68ff.). In this article, analytical insight into

language use of engineering students on sustainability is sought. The texts by the

engineering students are considered to give an overview of the order of discourse of

the engineering profession as they experience it.

The textual analysis includes micro-levels of textual analysis only insofar as they

contribute to the interpretation of meaning above the level of individual sentences.

Analysis of grammar (based on Fairclough 1992, 2003), metaphors (based on

Fairclough 2003; Lakoff and Johnson 2002) and a semiotic analysis focusing on

oppositions in text (based on Greimas 1974; Feldman 1995; Hallbäck 1983) are the

analytical techniques used for this purpose. The motive for the selection of these

analytical strategies was inductively led by the empirical finding of metaphors and

oppositions as recurring means to communicate sustainability concepts.

The metaphor analysis will be conducted first, followed by the semiotic analysis

of the opposing discourses identified. Both analytical approaches combined with

grammatical analyses and theoretical contributions prepare the ground for the

critical discourse analysis.

TEXT

production process

interpretation process

DISCURSIVE PRACTICE, INTERACTION

social conditions of production

social conditions of interpretation

SOCIAL PRACTICE, CONTEXT

Fig. 1 Fairclough’s three- dimensional model for critical discourse analysis illustrates discourse as text, discursive practice and social practice (Fairclough 1989: 21, 1992: 73)

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Initially, the student responses were coded using computer assisted qualitative

data analysis software by means of an open type of coding following a grounded,

explorative approach without previously formulated hypotheses as a basis of the

categories. This is a demanding way of coding, since it requires a recoding of all the

material every time a new category is taken into use (Andersen et al. 2010: 177 ff).

Sustainability Metaphors

This section presents the different metaphors used by the engineering students to

illustrate the sustainability concept. Five different main metaphors were found

employed by the students illustrating sustainability as an efficient machine, as a

cycle, as balance, as profitability and as a (mental) condition. The metaphors coexist

in student responses and are not mutually exclusive, even at an individual level.

Their exact distinction is the result of an analytical process.

Apart from these metaphorical understandings of the concept, a minor part of the

students express a sustainability concept taking the word at its face-value only

relating to the denotations of the word which in its Danish translation is similar to

‘‘ability to carry’’. This leads to a sixth way of construing sustainability that focuses

mainly on the ability of for instance a bridge or a building to hold upright and

endure the physical or mechanical pressure as supposed. Examples of this way of

describing sustainability are given below:

You can use the word about a bridge. Is that bridge for instance sustainable?

Yes, it has been thoroughly constructed; nothing can make it fall apart.

Sustainability, supposedly, is about that it has to be able to hold or carry

something that is slightly heavy. Like duvets have a sustainability of downs,

which has to do with their ability to carry the air…

The main implication of this way of construing sustainability is that it limits the

concept to a technical aspect with relevance to specific engineering practices instead

of an important contextual condition of all (engineering) activity.

Sustainability as an Efficient Machine

Technical language typically employed to characterise machines and their way of

functioning is very often used by the engineering students when they describe

sustainability. They employ terms like ‘‘input’’, ‘‘output’’ and refer to matters that

‘‘come out in the other end’’. This view on sustainability emphasises a production

paradigm. Sustainability is not an end in itself but a way of ensuring continuous

exploitation of nature’s resources for production purposes. Sustainability as an

efficient machine has to do with human wishes to produce and ‘‘production’’ is

frequently mentioned by the engineering students.

Man-made machines have increased production rates immensely. Thanks to

machines, humans have to a very large extent succeeded in exploiting nature to their

benefit. And machines have marked the prevalent view on life in modern societies.

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But to some, machines and the mechanistic rationality they are accused of bringing

about have had a range of negative influences on (human) nature for instance in

terms of alienation. The machine metaphor of sustainability implies a mechanistic

worldview which makes perfect sense if one wants to underline certain aspects of

what can be understood by the term sustainability. But at the same time other

aspects of sustainability are overlooked by the machine metaphor.

A machine is a concrete construction consisting of moveable parts that are

supposed to conduct a specific, pre-defined task of producing or transforming input

(raw material, fuel) to output (energy, forward propulsion or a product). A machine

can only perform the task that man has prepared it to do. The only deviance to this

task happens if the machine breaks. In that case the machine must be repaired, and

that is a metaphor employed by one of the engineering students depicting

sustainability as what comes about when ‘‘…nature can’repair’ itself’’. It does not follow directly from the use of the metaphor whether or not

sustainability is considered within human regulation and control as a machine. But

the expectations of technology as a means to solve challenges are high among the

engineering students. This is illustrated by their answer to another question in the

survey. The engineering students are asked about their agreement with the

statement: ‘‘Science and technology can sort out any problem’’. 2

Their responses

highlight that they compared to both average Danes and Danes at approximately the

same age are much more confident that science and technology can be utilised by

humans to the repairal of any problem we might have. To be more explicit, 45 % of

the newly enrolled Danish engineering students who answered to the question

reported to agree (N = 1,466), in comparison to 21 % of Danes in the age range of

15–24 and 11 % of all Danes (N = 89 and 993, respectively, TNS 2010).

In line with the wish of controlling sustainability embedded in this metaphor, the

engineering students have a large focus on efficiency. They construe sustainability

as an efficient machine with a maximum yielding capacity and a minimum of costs,

mainly in terms of negative ecological consequences.

The students construct sustainability discursively both as something that ideally

functions as an efficient machine, and at the same time as a characteristic of the

products of actual machines. Machines are referred to metaphorically to depict

sustainability as a whole and literally to describe outcomes of the production

process, namely the consumer goods stemming from the machinery of the industrial

society that can or cannot be characterised as sustainable.

The machine metaphor is not capable of holding or explaining a rationale for

human activity that gives no product and serves no immediate purpose. The

metaphor of sustainability implies a notion of human nature as driven by rational

choice. This leaves no room for motivations like compassion, human concern or joy

and no emphasis of the importance of a range of generic issues such as life-long

learning, social responsibility and communication skills etc. that are embraced by

2 Compilation of those answering ‘‘Totally agree’’ or ‘‘Tend to agree’’.‘‘Do not know’’-answers removed

from total. Other response options were: ‘‘Neither agree nor disagree’’, ‘‘Tend to disagree’’ and ‘‘Totally

disagree’’. The survey question was formulated in correspondence with the Eurobarometer survey (TNS

2010) to make possible the comparison.

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other sustainability concepts (Læssøe 2009; Gough and Scott 2007; Scott and

Gough 2010; Svanström et al. 2008; Venkataraman 2009; Wals and Kieft 2010).

Sustainability as a Cycle

Another metaphor that implies transformation processes is the metaphor for

sustainability as a cycle. The connotations of the cycle metaphor are diverse. Cycles

can be seen as organic or biological processes, emphasising transformation. This is

often illustrated in recycling logos depicting a circle of arrows. Unlike the machine

metaphor, a cycle rarely focuses on input or output, but is often considered a closed

system in an ongoing dynamic continual not unlike what characterises an autopoietic

system (Luhmann 2000; Kneer and Nassehi 2000). The boundary concepts implied in

the cycle metaphor remain vague, though. What is considered part of the cycle and

what is considered outside of it is not clear, just as there is no consistent connotative

referral to either a closed or an open system-understanding of this cycle. This means

that the cycle metaphor is strong in its emphasis on dynamic movement but not able

to meaningfully contribute to the clarification of a more stable, structural worldview.

The cycle metaphor is described with terms as ‘‘going in circles’’, ‘‘revolve’’,

‘‘cycle’’, ‘‘spin around’’ and ‘‘form a ring’’. The metaphor implies the circular

movement, an all-encompassing universalism and a time horizon that, in principle,

stretches forever.

Something that can continue in circles and that never runs out.

Sustainability is when a system theoretically can function infinitely if there are

no outside influences. That is a system that can be maintained because all

resources circulate.

The coupling of the eternity of the cycle metaphor with the machine metaphor for

sustainability gives rise to the wide-spread use of a specific cyclical metaphor,

namely the perpetual motion unit. In the use of this metaphor the students clearly

differ in their perceived realisability of such a concept. Some students take the

notion of eternity for granted and argue that resources are continually created and

recreated and pollution ‘‘repaired’’. Others take a more pragmatic stance and

tentatively add ‘‘as much as possible’’ in their descriptions of the, ideally,

indeterminable cycle.

Another variation of the cycle metaphor is captured in what a range of engineering

students refer to as ‘‘cradle to cradle’’. In short, this business concept refers to the use of

industrial (waste) products as input in the production of new products that in themselves

are re-cyclable. The slogan has been branded by McDonough and Braungart (2002) as a

sustainability metaphor in itself and transfers the human experience of birth and death

and of the rise of new life from earthly reminiscence of the old to the sphere of

production. This personification shapes the understanding of production as something

cyclical. In the same way as the perpetual motion unit, this metaphor bridges the gap

between the metaphors of machine and cycle which softens up some of the inhumane

connotations of productivity within the machine metaphor. Critical student reflections on

the implications of understanding sustainability as a cradle to cradle-cycle are not found.

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Sustainability as Balance

Balance is an often mentioned construal of the sustainability concept. Alternatively,

the engineering students mention ‘‘equilibrium’’ or they use the verb to ‘‘weigh’’

something against something else.

This metaphor involves a focus on tranquillity and stability very different from

that of the machine and cycle metaphors. The terminology borrows from the realm

of mechanical physics, and these ways of describing sustainability imply no notion

of dynamics, over time progression or change. Sustainability is discursively

excluded from developmental and productivity spheres and plays the role as a more

conservative concept involving ‘‘conservation’’ and ‘‘preservation’’.

The balance metaphor also implies the ideal that any movement needs to be

stabilised or neutralised by a counter movement. Increase or reduction of the weight

of things on the left scale must be accompanied by a corresponding increase or

reduction on right side:

…you take something and you give something back so that there is a balance.

The scale picture leads to another implication of the balance metaphor, namely

the dualism related to the construal of exactly two opposing concerns. The metaphor

assumes a sharp distinction between things that easen and things that burden. The

students presuppose that it is possible to make an unequivocal decision on what it

takes to cause positive and negative effects in relation to sustainability. This

simplification does not comprise complex cases or problems with both positive and

negative implications or circumstances that change between beneficiality and

harmfulness over time or across space.

Furthermore, the balance metaphor leads to the simplistic impression that the two

dual factors can be meaningfully assessed and balanced, that they can be weighed

on the same scale and added in controlled doses, hence the frequent use of the terms

‘‘more’’ and ‘‘less’’.

Sustainability as Profitability

Economic terminology is very common among the engineering students when they

describe sustainability. They refer to ‘‘profit’’, ‘‘expenses’’, ‘‘costs’’ and ‘‘return’’.

The profitability metaphor does not confine the construal of sustainability to

economic sustainability. As in general, the students mainly refer to environmental

aspects of sustainability but economic experiences provide a source of ways to

understand aspects of sustainability. One student uses the profitability metaphor in

this way:

Sustainability is income = expenses. The expenses cannot get too high. The

Earth cannot afford that.

Such economic terms result in a transferral of money’s exchange mechanism to

the concept of sustainability. In the same way as profitability is the result of higher

economic gains than expenses, sustainability also becomes a question depending on

the relation between activities that have positive and negative effects on the

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household economy of the globe. Sustainability is construed as the desired result of

a range of transactions between human beings and man-made industry on one side

and nature or environment on the other.

As with the balance metaphor, duality marks the profitability metaphor and

reduces real life complicity to gains and losses. Sustainability is understood as

profitability according to the ‘‘total account’’ and is acquired if ‘‘…you give and take, so that the account is still balanced.’’ In this and other cases the metaphor for

sustainability as profitability is used in union with that of balance which is a

common metaphor within economy. This metaphorical combination downplays

intentions to accumulate economic gains, and instead focuses on an economy that

breaks even.

The economic terms are not only used to describe sustainability as profitability,

but also to assign characteristics normally attributed to the goods within the

economic system to the concept of sustainability. Hence, sustainability is referred to

as something that can be obtained at a price (e.g. lower consumption or reduced

pollution). And sustainability concerns are often considered a barrier to free market

forces and the objective of obtaining profit.

Sustainability as a (Mental) Condition

Sustainability is also compared to some kind of condition that things can be in.

When giving closer descriptions of this condition, the engineering students’

language is rich in personifications where nature, production processes or an

unspecified entity (as ‘‘something’’) is attributed human characteristics such as

‘‘needs’’. The metaphorical comparison of sustainability with human condition,

perhaps a mental condition ‘‘…allows us to understand a spectrum of human experiences with non-human entities by means of human motives, characteristics

and activities.’’ (Lakoff and Johnson 2002, p. 45, author’s translation.) Sustain-

ability as a (mental) condition pictures a positively charged condition often relating

to ‘‘harmony’’ and ‘‘peace’’. But the students also refer to interrelational human

conditions such as ‘‘relationships’’ and ‘‘interplay’’. As in everyday language, the

balance metaphor is also mixed with this metaphor in the description of the

anthropomorphic, sustainable mental condition of ‘‘being in balance’’.

A condition—in particular a mental condition—is in comparison with the other

sustainability metaphors characterised by its somewhat more intangible nature. One

could expect this kind of emotional analogy for sustainability to be remote to a

profession of engineers that are traditionally connoted with ‘‘hard core’’, natural

scientific, mathematical-logical rationality. And this metaphor actually is the least

predominant and the least coherent of the sustainability metaphors identified among

the engineering students.

Metaphoric Interplay

The metaphoric interplay between the five different images used to explain

sustainability is complex and incoherent. The students do not stick to a consistent

use of one metaphor and as in most everyday metaphorical language they do not

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reflect or elaborate on the implications of the metaphors of their sustainability

concept. The interpretation of the metaphor connotations, implications and interplay

derive analytically. The use of metaphors is considered contingent. This entails that

some potential worldviews are emphasised rather than others.

The social responsibility aspect of sustainability often found in literature (e.g.

Carew and Mitchell 2008; Lozano 2008; Costanza and Pattern 1995; Jamison 2012)

is weakly represented in the student responses. Referrals to ‘‘being responsible’’ or

‘‘ethical’’ are common, but mainly in relation to environmental sustainability. The

student construals of sustainability do hold examples of consideration of other

people as a motive. These examples mainly relate to working conditions of peasants

in developing countries producing coffee, cocoa or tobacco for consumption in

industrialised countries. When mentioned, though, social sustainability is always

represented as an addition to the dominating environmental sustainability perspec-

tive. This may suggest that engineering students at this level do not in general

consider socially responsible and ethical concerns for other human beings part of

their future professional role. To a certain extent, the engineering students seem to

experience social concerns as belonging to a realm outside of their professional role.

This may also explain why only 2.4 and 1.4 % of the responding students in the

same survey select societal context and ethics, respectively, among their five most

important items practicing engineering on a list with 20 items. 3

The comments from

two of the ten students contributing to the pilot testing of the survey point in the

same direction:

Ethics, engineers are not supposed to prepare for that…

Ethics! Others must deal with that.

The engineering students seem to conceive of these social, interpersonal and

ethical matters as practices that are outside of their future professional field. Social

sustainability does not appear to be considered a relevant context of their societal

role as future professionals.

Two main themes stand out as central conceptual conflicts. These consider the

role of the human being and the view upon nature.

When describing sustainability the engineering students almost never include

agency in their sentence structure. Human beings are very seldom given an active

role in the grammatical construction of their sentences. Instead they use passive

constructions, nominalisations where things are grammatically given the role as

objects and negations that make it possible to stray from an active placement of

human responsibility. They largely refrain from self-referral and reflect rarely on the

role of neither themselves nor human beings in general towards sustainability

aspects. The lack of human action is evident in the (mental) condition metaphor,

3 The remaining 18 items to select from were: Business knowledge, Communication, Conducting

experiments, Contemporary issues, Creativity, Data analysis, Design, Engineering analysis, Engineering

tools, Global context, Leadership, Life-long learning, Management skills, Math, Problem solving,

Professionalism, Science, Teamwork. N = 3,480, weighted figures. Response rate: 44.4 % The question

was formulated: Of the 20 items below, please put a check mark next to the FIVE you think are MOST

IMPORTANT practicing engineering.

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where non-human entities play the active role instead of humans and in the cycle

metaphor where human action is considered absent from the ideal concept of

continuous, circular movement. In the case of the balance metaphor people are

given a larger responsibility for assuring balance between harmful and beneficial

things or actions. But this is still mentioned on the metaphoric level and seldom

directly related to concrete decision-making in real-life. The following quote

illustrates how human action is downplayed by means of a passive sentence form

and the use of a grammatical metaphor where a grammatical structure, here an

action (e.g. killing members of a population), is substituted by a noun (the balance

of the population).

The product can be sustainable if the balance of a population is taken into

consideration so that it will continually be possible to produce.

Machine and profitability metaphors for sustainability emphasise certain aspects

of human action but delimit the responsibility of human beings to considerations of

how to fulfil either economic or efficiency purposes. These two metaphors also

share the same view on nature. The main role of the nature or the environment is to

contribute to human goal achievement. Whether the goal is interpreted as efficiency

or profit, nature is considered the source of raw materials and the unintended

receiver of waste and by-products such as CO2 emission and pollution. Often nature

takes the grammatical position as the direct object in the sentences, receiving the

action of a transitive verb as in these examples: ‘‘…harming the nature’’, ‘‘…affecting the environment’’.

From this rationalistic, goal-oriented point of view sustainability concerns are

restraining because they limit the possibilities of achieving the primary goal.

Environmental harm is considered a risk that needs to be minimised. The machine

and the profitability metaphors both contribute heavily to the construction of a

discourse of utility maximisation characterised by this view of nature and its focus

on productivity and efficiency. This implies a very anthropocentric worldview

where ethical concerns are construed as consideration for human needs and desires,

first and foremost. Nature is considered delimited from human beings and subject to

human mastering and exploitation. Coexisting with this discursively constructed

nature utilitarianism a very different discourse perhaps best described as roman-

ticism challenges the construal of the concept of nature. The romanticist nature

discourse is marked by collective regret on behalf of mankind and its technological

progress. (See also Jamison 1997, 2001; Mitcham 2009; Wagner 2006 for more on

nature utilitarianism, romanticism and their ethical implications to the engineering

profession in society.) The interplay of these two discourses and the dilemma they

place engineering students in are described in the following section.

The Engineering Dilemma

By means of a semiotic analysis this section investigates the opposing discourses

reflected in the students’ ways of mentioning nature and technology and discusses

the dilemma this might entail.

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On the one hand, the students understand and explain sustainability as a question

of preserving nature and the non-technical. This coins the romanticist discourse. On

the other hand, as engineering students, the subject of their focus and attention is

exactly technology. This is expressed through the utilitaristic discourse.

Two semiotic squares serve to illustrate the opposition of the romanticist and the

utilitaristic discourses found among a large part of the engineering students. (See

Fig. 2).

The left side of the figure illustrates the romanticist ideal of environmental

sustainability where the consideration of nature is the primary aspect. Non-nature is

the not prescribed, and technology plays the negative part as hampering—or maybe

even destroying—of nature and hereby forms the prohibited element in the top right

corner of the figure. Non-nature and technology implicate each other in the same

way as nature and non-technology do. This semiotic square illustrates the classic,

almost mythical opposition between nature on the one side and culture, civilisation

or technology on the other. 4

The oppositional understanding of this conceptual relation is of course a

simplification that among other things is unable to encompass the fact that human

beings belong in both categories as emphasised by Horkheimer and Adorno (1944).

Nature is within the human. Human beings are nature and culture at the same time,

exponents for nature, civilisation and technology.

The engineering students often describe sustainability with negative definitions

such as: ‘‘Sustainability means that we do not destroy the nature…’’ or ‘‘That one does not damage the environment’’. Positive descriptions of what sustainability is—

instead of what it is not—are found, but the negating ones are by far the most

dominant. These two different ways of describing sustainability underline a large

experienced difference between the ideals of the students and the reality they

discursively dissociate themselves from. From their point of view there is a large

difference between how society ought to look and how the actual reality appears.

This implies a strong, normative ideal of how nature should be coexisting with the

wide-spread concept that this is not the case—perhaps even quite the contrary.

…our current consumption culture is untenable and depleting of our natural resources.

Technology (prohibited)

Nature (prescribed)

Non-nature (not prescribed)

Non-technology (not prohibited)

Nature (prohibited)

Technology (prescribed)

Non-technology (not prescribed)

Non-nature (not prohibited)

Fig. 2 The two semiotic squares illustrate the engineering dilemma in relation to sustainability

4 For more theory and discussion on the societal role of this classic opposition see Horkheimer and

Adorno (1944), Jamison (1997, 2001) and Wagner (2006).

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Hence, it is about a world without incentive for all the bad things that today

unfortunately characterise our world.

Unfortunately, not much on Earth today is sustainable.

The figure to the right illustrates the shift in conceptualisation that is found when

the students relate to sustainability from within the context of the engineering

profession they imagine to belong to in near future. As engineering students they are

to a large extent motivated by their fascination of and flair for technology. From this

point of view technology is the prescribed, invented to utilise and yield from

everything non-technologic that it is in a contradictory relation to. Nature is

depicted as the object that technology should exploit. Hereby nature in its pure,

untreated form—assuming such a form makes sense—serving no man-made

purpose is considered the symbolically prohibited element of the figure. In this

version of the semiotic square the prohibited element is weakly represented in the

engineering student responses which might be related to the strength of the previous

semiotic square where nature serves as the prescribed element. The impact of the

utilitaristic semiotic square mainly relates to the wide-spread use of the utilitaristic

discourse.

The two coexisting semiotic squares are in conflict to an extent that causes

difficulties for the engineering students. Building bridge between these two

conceptual frameworks is no simple task, hence the notion dilemma. How is it

possible to express romanticist ideals of environmental sustainability and bemoan

the environmental consequences of technological progress and, still, invest ones

time and energy in an education within technology?

To some of the engineering students this apparently is not possible. They pick

their side and decide to rely on ‘‘the development’’ and ‘‘the progress’’. Such words

are often attributed independent power by means of personifications. One student

directly places his reliance in the problem solving ability of the national community,

‘‘we’’, understood more specifically as the Danish society that he considers an

example of a highly developed and technologically competent society:

Engineerically the concept [sustainability, author insertion] means a society

which is no. 1 on a global scale concerning development. A good illustration

of such a society is Denmark. We are in 2010; the country is fully developed

and well under way with developing new technologies and building on the old

ones. Such a sustainable society has taken into account a range of problems

and will find solutions to present and future issues.

The majority of the students who contribute to the discursive construction of this

symbolic dilemma do not explicitly seek to overcome it. The two opposing

tendencies coexist—not peacefully, nor in war. It seems, the engineering students

try to avoid the explicit dilemma and instead deal with romanticist nature concepts

and environmental sustainability concerns outside of their professional and

personal interest in technology. For the most part, the students seem to discursively

construct the two opposing worldviews as separate, but coexisting worldviews.

Romanticism is rarely reconciled with utilitarianism although no open conflict is

expressed either. The strong normative ideal of how nature should be preserved

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and considered seems to exist along with the opposing view on nature inherent in

the utilitaristic wish to develop technology to human benefit and exploitation of

nature. At a first glance no possible synthesis of these opposing views appears

which must place the engineering students in a symbolic dilemma that they appear

to try to disregard. But there is evidence to suggest that at least some of the future

engineers do picture a way of handling the dilemma by reinventing technology in a

new and sustainable version. They foresee that technology bears the potential to

bring the society closer to their ideals of sustainability at some point in time in a

not yet realised future.

Be creative and innovative to research and make/create/invent new technol-

ogies and distribute them, so they are broadly available. [Not translated].

Using science to develop new technologies, e.g. green technologies could be

one example. [Not translated.]

This [sustainability, author] can be achieved by the use of the newest

technologies…

It is also a world where people can have as many children as they like, because

technology allows that there is enough food, space and means for everyone to

be able to live under high standards.

One of the engineering students even indicates that he by means of his decision to

pursue an engineering education takes on a particular societal obligation to convince

his surroundings that the technology paradigm (here termed as ‘‘being forward-

looking’’) does not necessarily imply damaging consequences to the environment:

‘‘It is important that engineers show others that one can be forward-looking without

having to harm the environment.’’

Discursive Formations among Nascent Technology Professionals

This section focuses on the level of social practices and elaborates on the findings

drawn from actual text and from the discursive practices that it is articulated within.

(Cf. Fairclough 1992, p. 73) The discursive formations among these nascent

technology professionals are analysed as enactment of social practice (Fairclough

2003). As newly enrolled engineering students the respondents of the survey that

this article refers to have taken their first steps on the pathway to full membership of

the engineering profession. Assuming that an order of discourse of the engineering

profession can be analytically identified as the language aspects of the social

practices within the engineering education institutions and among engineering

professionals, the process of becoming an engineer involves the inculcation, as

Fairclough calls it, of engineering discourses:

Discourses as imaginaries may also come to be inculcated as new ways of

being, new identities… Inculcation is a matter of, in the current jargon, people coming to ‘own’ discourses, to position themselves inside them, to act and

906 S. Haase

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think and talk and see themselves in terms of new discourses (Fairclough

2003, p. 208).

Apart from the ‘‘coming to own’’ technical and discipline-specific discourses (see

Atman et al. 2008 for an analysis of this process) engineers-to-come must also

familiarise themselves with and learn to use other types of discourses adequately to

take on an engineering identity. The discursive landscape of the newly enrolled

engineering students is of course not identical with the order of discourse of the

engineering profession in general; to a large extent, the engineering students take

their point of departure in expectations and assumptions about the engineering

profession. But they already do identify with the profession and they articulate how

they respond ‘‘as future engineer’’ or explicitly delimit their answer to what they

consider their field of engineering e.g. energy or construction. In this way the

discursive formations identified in this article can be considered a window to the

initial inculcation process of these future engineers of the profession’s order of

discourse. A first draft, so to say, of their nascent professional identity formation.

The inculcation of engineering discourse is, hence, an important way of acquiring

professional legitimacy, professional exclusivity and power to define and determine

certain ways of acting in response to practical problems which according to Harrits

and Olesen (2012) are distinguishing characteristics of a profession. And the

professional practice and characteristics are based on the integration and combi-

nation of knowledge of a spectrum of different science-based disciplines with tacit,

experience-based knowledge (Harrits and Olesen 2012). These knowledge forms are

presented to the students through the engineering education system. The students

interpret and represent them to themselves and others e.g. as institutionalised in

projects and exams and the discourses shape and reshape the engineering practices

they begin to enact and identify themselves with during the formation of their

professional identity.

The identification of the five overarching metaphors for sustainability and the

dilemma between the utilitaristic and the romanticist discourses give an insight in

the worldviews of the students and in the societal roles they expect to play as

engineering professionals.

With few exceptions, the sustainability construals of the engineering students all

lack the ability to comprise the ambivalence, the uncertainty and the complexity of

the concept. If left unchallenged, such an oversimplification may in practice result

in too little effort put in the process of estimating sustainability consequences of

actual problem solving. Not only management of known risks but also the fact of

having to tackle a reality of unknown, potentially harmful effects of an engineering

solution may much more adequately depict their future working conditions.

Furthermore, the wide gap between the ideal expressed by many of the students as a

part of the romanticist discourse and the descriptions of the actual state of the world

seem to cause disillusion or defeat for the majority of these young people who find that

technology bears at least some of the blame. This might not be the best encouragement

for engineering student retention. The state of disillusion relates to the tendency to

dissociate oneself and other humans discursively from an active role in relation to

sustainability by means of nominalisation and a lack of grammatical agency of human

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actors. Instead, most students take for granted the assumption that concepts like ‘‘the

development’’ and ‘‘the progress’’ have an inherent logic of progression indepen-

dently of human interference which can be traced back to a capitalistic market

discourse with invisible laws of progression and growth. This positive interpretation

of capitalistic market values goes hand in hand with an optimistic assessment of the

societal role of technology which is considered a means of production.

It [sustainability, author] is also the ability to stay in development… In short, sustainability equals future or prosperity…

This perspective makes it difficult to conceive of technology as something that

can be controlled and directed to serve other purposes than productivity and

economy. And it supports the view on sustainability as a hindrance to market forces.

Another assumption that the students consider an unquestioned truth is the

underlying assumption that many refer to about human responsibility for

environmental degradation, climate change and resource depletion. One of the

1,211 students is critical towards this. He refers to ‘‘…the constant fear mongering of global warming.’’ And he adds to it that:’’The earth’s atmosphere has had

temperatures all over the scale for thousands of years and the earth has kept its

sustainability.’’ [Not translated.] The rest of the engineering students who mention

problems with environmental sustainability through their use of modality accept as a

fact that the changes are man-made.

With this one exception the linkage between human productivity and technology

on the one side and the acceptance of human responsibility for detrimental

environmental effects on the other, the scale of the tension between technology and

nature is emphasised.

The critical voices among the engineering students direct their criticism at

politicians, at human beings and their ‘‘egoism’’ and—as in this case—at the power

of economy in the society:

How and when did economy become the dominating science? Why can

natural science not speak for itself anymore? A large-scale global reaction

against global warming would have taken place sooner had we not been living

in a global society ruled by an economic science that only considers economic

growth and optimisation. This is from my point of view not sustainable; the

results from natural science speak for themselves.

Although explicitly expressed by a minority only, many students seem to hope

that the reinvention of a technology freed from its utilitaristic purpose, serving

nature instead, holds the key to tackling the societal challenges. And this might even

potentially be a way of overturning the prejudicial connotations of the engineering

profession and regain professional pride and legitimacy.

To me sustainability is not to find the easiest solution. Humans could decide to

use up all coal and oil, cut down the rest of the rain forest, use chemical

products in the fields etc. etc. Sustainability is that we in many cases choose

not to. We continue to search for new solutions that can damage the Earth less.

It is a really good motivation to work for a long existence of our world.

908 S. Haase

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Conclusion

The research presented in this article gives an insight in the baseline understandings

and anticipations of engineering students at the very beginning of their pathway into

engineering. The engineering students enrolled in Danish engineering degree

programmes discursively construct a dilemma between technology and nature. On

the one side, a technology fascination is inherent in them and contributes to their

choice of education. On the other side, they share the prevailing focus on the

importance of environmental sustainability to which technology is often construed

as an obstacle.

The engineering students generally accept challenges to sustainability as a human

responsibility that technological progress bears a large part of the blame for.

They generally use the five metaphors efficient machine, cycle, balance,

profitability and (mental) condition to illustrate how they conceive of sustainability.

The metaphors are not used in logical coherence and they point to different ways of

construing the sustainability concept.

The student descriptions of sustainability show clear general tendencies:

• to focus on environmental sustainability, mainly at the expense of social sustainability and ethics that appear to be considered tasks of other professions.

• to disregard human agency including one’s own and attribute independent autonomy to progress and development.

• to consider profit and rationality the only motives of human practice. • to construe sustainable development as a dual battle between good and bad,

beneficial and harmful, income and expense.

• to discursively construct an oversimplified sustainability understanding without room for the complex, internal dilemmas and the ambivalence that are present in

discussions about how to practice sustainability.

• to construe sustainability as a hindrance to human civilisation, productivity and development.

• to represent two overall discourses of utilitarianism and romanticism that coexist in a very tense interplay and characterise the engineering dilemma in relation to

nature and technology.

The discursive landscape of the engineering students provides information on the

mixed emotions in relation to the role of technology in society that they carry with

them into their profession and that might help to explain possible image problems of

engineering in their generation. The student descriptions not only point to this

problematic construal of their future profession, some of them also see a way to

overcome this dilemma in a restructuring of the rational paradigm of technology

into a sustainable, green way of practicing technological development. But this

sustainable way of discursively constructing engineering needs to be nurtured and

co-constructed by engineering educational discourse as well as in engineering

practice in order to gain a foothold and become legitimate as a dominant discourse

in the profession’s order of discourse and in the social practice where it could make

a real difference.

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