2025/10/21 by Mallory James · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/19378629.2025.2556378
openalex publication_date 2025/10/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Participation in national professional associations is a common strategy for self-distinction. Since 1919, some Australian engineers have joined a national association, affirming agreement to align with its code of ethics. Yet, recent scholarship shows that markers of merit and virtue are not just about quality work: they also support the production of hierarchical difference. Framed by this interest, I describe how codes of ethics construct the meanings of responsible engineering. Specifically, I compare the changing contents within Australia’s trajectory of codes between 1919 and 2022. What counts as responsible practice? What are constructed as opportunities and threats to engineering ‘professionalism’? How should a practitioner engage with questions of appropriate technology and public critiques of technoscience? Content analysis reveals a density of emphasis upon etiquette rules for relationships between peers and clients. I argue that this infuses responsible professionalism with class-specific loyalties that could more readily serve to dampen, rather than amplify, critiques of engineering’s wider harms. Although codes from 1966 to 2022 add a new language of aims that discursively acknowledges critique of engineering’s harms, for the entire arc of Australia’s codes, gatekeeping the edges of the profession remains obligatory, in what I call a ‘historical class politics of expertise’.