2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Amazon Effect: A Case Study of Corporate Influence on Student Macro-Ethical Reasoning

Presented at Values in Engineering: Ethics and Justice-Oriented Engineering

As the field of engineering faces looming societal issues, it becomes particularly important to foster more “holistic engineers” with systems-thinking skills and an understanding of the macro-ethical impacts of their work (Canny and Bielefeldt, 2015) Macro-ethics here refers to the collective social responsibility of engineers as a profession, as opposed to micro-ethics, which concern activities within the profession (Herkert, 2005). However, college students studying engineering in the United States exhibit a decline in concern for public welfare over the course of their education (Cech, 2014) as well as a tendency to orient to micro-ethical issues over macro-ethical issues (Schiff et al, 2020). Scholars attribute these trends to ideologies pervasive in engineering spaces, such as depoliticization of engineering practice, technocracy, and meritocracy (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015). While Cech (2014) argues these status quo ideologies in engineering are maintained by a “culture of disengagement” that decreases interest in public welfare, Radoff et al. (2022) find indications that additional factors contribute to engaged students’ reproduction of such ideologies. They find, for example, instances of students in reproducing dehumanizing narratives regarding low-income communities, despite their enrollment in a voluntary program premised on cultivating socially responsible STEM professionals. This finding suggests that even students who remain “engaged” to some degree can reproduce status quo ideologies which Cech (2014) attributes to disengagement.
One explanation as to why a macro-ethically “engaged” student may fail to attend to the social aspects of design follows a deficit narrative: a lack of knowledge or ability. We see this assumption in comparisons of students’ and experts’ design processes, where the areas in which students behave differently than experts are interpreted as areas that require additional instruction on how to behave more like the experts (Atman et al., 2008). This presupposition of students’ lacking knowledge or skills, however, backgrounds contextual or interactional factors. Philip et al. (2018) challenges such assumptions in their analysis of a classroom discussion on the ethics of drone warfare, which exemplifies students’ convergence to American nationalism, but with the framing that this convergence is interactionally created, rather than the result of individual students’ stable, dogmatic beliefs. However, because their analysis is limited to the scope of a single class discussion, the extent to which students’ performance is situated in said class remains unclear.
In this paper, we attempt to understand the ways in which students reproduce ideologies dominant in engineering, as well as the situated nature of students’ ideological orientations in collaborative work. We consider a case study focus group from Radoff et al. (2022) where students reasoned through a hypothetical design scenario about a grocery store. We show how, despite many opportunities where problematic status-quo narratives are momentarily challenged, the students generally reject the challenges, not by arguing against them, but by positioning them outside the scope of their work. Further, we show how these moments of rejection are tightly coupled with attempts to emulate the multinational technology company Amazon. Finally, we use additional data to illustrate the situatedness of one student’s performance, and theorize the influence of Amazon as a “strange attractor” in this student’s situated reasoning.

Authors

Dr. Fatima Naeem Abdurrahman University of Maryland, College Park [biography]

After completing undergraduate degrees in Physics, Astronomy, and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Maryland, Fatima earned a Masters and PhD in astrophysics from UC Berkeley. Her doctoral thesis included astrophysical work on black hole detection and adaptive optics instrumentation in addition to a qualitative study on relationship between the culture of academic astronomy in the US and the persistence of identity-based inequity in graduate programs. Following her PhD, Fatima joined the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Maryland's Department of Physics as a postdoctoral researcher, and now focuses on the study of ethics and institutional change in STEM higher education.
Sona Chudamani University of Maryland, College Park [biography]

Sona Chudamani is a junior Computer Science major in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the co-corporate contact for the UMD Association for Women in Computing (AWC), a club that strives to create an inclusive community to promote gender equality and empowerment in computing fields. She is also the Editor-in-Chief for QUESTPress, a newspaper in the Robert H. Smith School of Business. Her introduction to the field of ethics research came in her first year of college, when she joined a paper as a research fellow headed by Dr. Jen Radoff and Dr. Chandra Turpen. She hopes to combine her passions for business, technology, and ethics to make the technology industry more equitable.
Dr. Chandra Anne Turpen University of Maryland College Park [biography]

Dr. Chandra Turpen is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. She has expertise in physics education research and engineering education research. Her work involves designing and researching contexts for learning (for students, educators, and faculty) within higher education. Her research draws from perspectives in anthropology, cultural psychology, and the learning sciences to focus on the role of culture and ideology in science learning and educational change. Her research interests include how to: (a) disrupt problematic cultural narratives in STEM (e.g. brilliance narratives, meritocracy, and individualistic competition); (b) cultivate equity-minded approaches in educational spheres, where educators take responsibility for racialized inequities in student success; and (c) cultivate more ethical future scientists and engineers by blending social, political and technological spheres. She prioritizes working on projects that seek to share power with students and orient to students as partners in educational transformation. She pursues projects that aim to advance social justice in undergraduate STEM programs and she makes these struggles for change a direct focus of her research.
Dr. Jennifer Radoff University of Maryland, College Park [biography]

Jen Radoff is an assistant research professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. She studies teaching and learning in K-16 STEM, with a focus on political, ideological, and axiological dimensions of learning. She also supports educators as they work to create more equitable learning environments for students.
Andrew Elby University of Maryland, College Park [biography]

Andrew Elby's work focuses on student and teacher epistemologies and how they couple to other cognitive machinery and help to drive behavior in learning environments. His academic training was in Physics and Philosophy before he turned to science (partic
Dr. David Tomblin University of Maryland, College Park [biography]

David is the director of the Science, Technology and Society program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He works with STEM majors on the ethical and social dimensions of science and technology. David also does public engagement with science and

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