Blackwell Reference Online

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Engineers depend on their technical knowledge and skills to carry out their responsibilities for research, design, development, testing, and maintenance of technological products and systems. Their responsibilities can include quality control, safety management, implementation of government regulations, and sales. A great majority of engineers practice in business organizations; they are so integral to so many areas of business that any comprehensive account of business ethics has to consider engineers' roles and responsibilities. The surge in growth of the engineering profession from the last third of the nineteenth century onward coincided with the rise of modern large‐scale business organizations. These organizations needed engineers to remove some of the guesswork from operations on a large scale, and they could afford the skills of large numbers of trained engineers. The process by which new industries arose in close association with the growth of fields of engineering continues to the present ( Layton, 1986 ). Engineers began organizing as a profession in the second half of the nineteenth century. They formed separate societies specific to areas of practice (e.g. civil engineering) and they continued the process of forming professional societies and formulating standards as their numbers surged, in spite of their intimate ties with business organizations. Over this same period, ... log in or subscribe to read full text