IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 97

methods for engaging them. In the mining and oil and
gas industries, there is a history of corporations choosing
to engage with " light green " environmental groups
that are sympathetic to industrial activity rather than
" dark greens " who are critical of capitalism [2], [6],
[7]. The voluntary nature of CSR contrasts with more
rights-based frameworks for regulating corporate
practices: interacting with corporations as a " citizen "
that bears particular rights, enforced by the government,
is distinct from interacting with corporations as
a " stakeholder " that has no particular levers to hold
corporations accountable beyond public pressure.
While these features of the contemporary practices
of CSR can fuel claims that the field is nothing more
than disingenuous greenwash, my research demonstrates
that CSR can be a resource for engineers and
others seeking to reform the corporations employing
them [2]. During my ethnographic research, I came to
know engineers seeking to improve their companies'
environmental and social performance. They were
able to use the rhetoric of CSR to advocate for greater
investments in community relations teams and more
stringent environmental practices. John, for example,
came to know well the people and places where his
company was planning operations in his position
as the point person for ensuring that they complied
with the performance standards of the institutions
financing their projects. To do that work, he had to
make the case for greater social and environmental
accountability among the operations teams that were
designing the facilities. To do so, he showed how
the performance standards lined up with the corporation's
previously expressed CSR policies, in effect
minimizing the sense that CSR was " external " to the
company's own commitments.
My book Also shows, however, that the corporate
context of engineers' work put them in the position
of trying to reconcile multiple, sometimes competing
accountabilities: to their employers, to their profession,
to the public, and ultimately, to themselves. Taking a
pragmatic approach, they poured their efforts into what
they called " win-wins " : activities that would preserve
their companies' profitability, uphold their personal
and professional ethics, and provide economic benefits
to the public while minimizing harm. While there
is much to admire in their work, this pragmatism skirts
crucial questions: Who gets to define what a " win "
is? Wins for whom? Designing oil and gas well pads
to be less obtrusive by using electric generators and
September 2022
putting up tall hay bale walls, for example, does not
address the values of local residents who are opposed
to fracking activities in their neighborhood at all. This
compromise approach of CSR focuses corporate investment
on activities that support the company's financial
bottom line, sidelining those ethical obligations that
do not. Corporate accountability, my ethnography
suggests, would be more robust if engineers and others
acknowledged the limits of " win-wins " and opened
up space for the public to define for themselves what
a good life is and how corporations can-or cannot-
facilitate their flourishing.

 References
[1] M. Welker, D. Partridge, and R. Hardin, " Corporate
lives: New perspectives on the social life of the
corporate form: An introduction to supplement 3, "
Curr. Anthropol., vol. 52, no. S3, pp. S3-S16, 2011.
[2] J. M. Smith, Extracting Accountability: Engineers and
Corporate Social Responsibility. Cambridge, MA,
USA: MIT Press, 2021.
[3] F. Li, Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism,
and Expertise in Peru. Durham, London, U.K.: Duke
Univ. Press, 2015.
[4] D. Rajak, In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate
Social Responsibility. Stanford, CA, USA: Stanford
Univ. Press, 2011.
[5] J. A. Delborne, A. E. Kokotovich, and J. E.
Lunshof, " Social license and synthetic biology:
The trouble with mining terms, " J. Responsible
Innov., vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 280-297, Apr. 2020, doi:
10.1080/23299460.2020.1738023.
[6] M. Welker, Enacting the Corporation: An American
Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia, 1st ed.
Berkeley, CA, USA: Univ. California Press, 2014.
[7] S. Kirsch, " Sustainable mining, " Dialectical Anthropol.,
vol. 34, pp. 87-93, Mar. 2010.
Smith is a professor with the
Engineering, Design and Society Department,
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA. She
is also an anthropologist and an STS scholar whose
research interests center on energy, engineering,
and public accountability. Her most recent book
is Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate
Social Responsibility (MIT Press, 2021).
Jessica
 Direct questions and comments about this article
to Jessica Smith, Engineering, Design and Society
Department, Colorado School of Mines, Golden,
CO 80401, USA; jmsmith@mines.edu
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