Industrial Engineering’s Perspective of CSR

Industrial engineering is one of the five main fields of engineering that endeavour to improve the quality of life in society; ironically, actual production and services patterns have created unintended side effects such as environmental pollution and human health problems. This chapter seeks to provide an introduction to the early developments in the field of industrial engineering, and explore what the industrial engineer is capable of doing in order to promote the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or, in other words, to explore how he attempts to secure a long-term productivity growth while improving the quality of life for the stakeholders and environment. Industrial engineers face very complex problems daily because the issues they deal with involve human beings who are generally unpredictable. It is therefore important to emphasize the need for a new industrial engineer’s profile with an interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinarity knowledge that is not usually present in the traditional engineer’s profile. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some directions as to what an industrial engineer is capable of doing in order to secure a long-term productivity growth while improving the quality of life for workers and communities by adopting the principles and ethos of CSR. Initially, readers are provided with a brief overview of some early engineering developments with some explanations of the main branches of engineering science. One of the major challenges for future engineers is fulfilled with the principles embedded in sustainable development which go together with those entrenched in CSR. For this reason, it is necessary to absorb a systems thinking that encourages industrial engineers to function under the ethos of sustainability and CSR that provide them with a vision to operate well beyond the traditional focus on production, services and consumption.