Nicole M. Smith

Gender and Livelihood Diversification: Maasai Women’s Market Activities in Northern Tanzania

Abstract East African pastoralists are increasingly diversifying their livelihoods to bring cash into the household. While men dominate these activities, women’s contributions to household economies through new market activities make them pivotal players in livelihood diversification. This article compares Maasai women’s income-earning activities at local markets with their market activities at the gemstone mining area of Mererani. It shows that women’s economic activities simultaneously challenge and reify a pastoral gender system and that this differs according to a woman’s family and household status. In addition, it addresses the implications of these processes for rural development initiatives aimed at empowering women.

Engineering Students’ Views of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Case Study from Petroleum Engineering

The mining and energy industries present unique challenges to engineers, who must navigate sometimes competing responsibilities and codes of conduct, such as personal senses of right and wrong, professional ethics codes, and their employers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the current dominant framework used by industry to conceptualize firms’ responsibilities to their stakeholders, yet has it plays a relatively minor role in engineering ethics education. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary pedagogical intervention in a petroleum engineering seminar that sought to better prepare engineering undergraduate students to critically appraise the strengths and limitations of CSR as an approach to reconciling the interests of industry and communities. We find that as a result of the curricular interventions, engineering students were able to expand their knowledge of the social, rather than simply environmental and economic dimensions of CSR. They remained hesitant, however, in identifying the links between those social aspects of CSR and their actual engineering work. The study suggests that CSR may be a fruitful arena from which to illustrate the profoundly sociotechnical dimensions of the engineering challenges relevant to students’ future careers.