Professional Ethics in Construction and Engineering

8 Developing an Ethics Toolkit, as a Practical Guide for Managing Projects

We are trying to move away from looking at ethics as scandal to ethics as strategy. We are lifting the hood and seeing the concrete strategies companies are using as this might help to see what other companies can do.

Peter Singer

8.1 Introduction to the Chapter

This chapter is designed to assist construction professionals in the management of all stages of projects and particularly around legal and ethical compliance. With reference to the above quotation in seeing ethics management as an organisational strategy, proformas and checklists have been specially developed for this chapter to improve the robustness of processes and for compiling important data on projects. These have been devised to ensure that critical aspects of projects, including statutory compliance and quality controls are not compromised during the life of projects. In this way, it is intended as a practical guide to managing the processes and procedures linked to each aspect.

Following Driscoll’s (three elements of reflection) Model (Driscoll 2000), the author’s reflective practice also led to reflective enquiries around construction professionals and specifically leading projects from an ethical and compliance standpoint. This triggered several questions which the author sought to unravel. These included:

• Where is the evidence that justifies the idea that theory and practice need to come together in ethics and compliance awareness ...