2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in the technology sector employ technology to address sustainability challenges, including reducing resource depletion, minimizing waste, reducing pollution, reusing resources, and, where possible, regenerating resources (Zonnenshain, 2006). Traditional engineering practices have often neglected environmental considerations, focusing primarily on economic efficiency while overlooking opportunities for sustainability. When environmental concerns are addressed, they are typically framed narrowly as cost-reduction opportunities rather than broader sustainability transformations. There is limited research on how engineering practitioners become engaged in designing for sustainability across their processes, products, and services. Many potential understandings of sustainability values (e.g., from reducing waste to maintain operations, to broadly redesigning products to support diverse stakeholders) have to be reconciled through a collaborative and integrative process that builds feedback from through an individual’s curiosity and continual pursuit of solutions.

Engineering leadership must overcome the indifference of engineering practitioners towards integrating sustainability into design practices. Because sustainability is a complex concept that involves numerous physical and social processes, there are multiple possible solutions and potentially unknown decision points that can motivate an understanding of sustainability impacts (Allen & Shonnard, 2011). This research will explore the application of engineering leadership practices to motivate engineering practitioners to become intrinsically engaged in seeking sustainability in their designs and to understand why engineers become motivated to pursue a broad definition of sustainability. This paper develops an initial theory to explain how engineers who previously viewed sustainability as a burden have become intrinsically motivated to pursue it in engineering projects. A critical area of exploration will be whether the use of technology by engineering practitioners can be harmonized with environmental concerns.

This research contributes to the field of engineering education by introducing the concept of ecological conversion through initiation within a professional community, using examples from religious conversion. Drawing on sociological research, including Rodney Stark's Network Theory of Conversion (NTOC), this research examines how community-based initiation processes influence professional identity transformation. The community dynamics can be integrated with engineering education frameworks, specifically the engineering for social justice model (E4SJ) by Leydens and Lucena (2018), to understand how engineers develop an intrinsic commitment to sustainability values. This conceptual paper synthesizes theories from the sociology of religion and engineering education to develop propositions about community-supported professional identity transformation, which will be validated through future empirical research. The integrated framework clarifies how engineering communities can foster engineers' commitment to sustainability through structured professional support processes, enabling collective action toward sustainable development goals.