L02 New corporate responsibilities in the digital economy Georgiana Grigore, Mike Molesworth & Rebecca Watkins. (2017).

Question 1

Academics have highlighted three dominant discourses showing to whom organizations are responsible:

Answer 1

(1) Firstly, Marrewijk (2001) describes the classical approach to CSR captured in Friedman’s definition that states: “the social responsibility of the business is to increase its profits”. From such a perspective, digital technology can be considered as merely an opportunity to increase efficiency, or in terms of opportunities for new sources of profit, and presents no particular responsibilities beyond this.

(2) Secondly and later, Carroll (1979) notes that there is a natural link between corporations and their stakeholders - the stakeholder approach – where it is desirable to identify legitimate stakeholders and take into account their rights and interests, and also to delineate how far such obligation extends. Here, digital technology may also be seen as an opportunity for stakeholder engagement and indeed this is reflected in emerging studies of CSR.

(3) Thirdly, the societal perspective maintains that companies have a responsibility towards society. At its most ambitious, this would ask that the use of digital technology should be to make the world a better place. This latest challenge to business ethics requires not simply the assurance that no harm is done to stakeholders, or that their views are considered, but that corporations actively produce a better society (and not just economic growth). Here then see the strongest normative claims for CSR theory.

Question 2

There are established issues of corporate responsibility that we can see as directly relevant to developments in the digital economy. These are:

Answer 2

(1) Transparency in communications;
(2) Taxation
(3) Privacy and data collection and storage,
(4) Use or avoidance of regulatory and self- regulatory communication.

Question 3

There are also new responsibilities that are currently silent in CSR or business ethics literature. These new responsibilities, we argue, are reflected in issues to do with:

Answer 3

• Commodities, contractual agreements and ownership;
• Exploitation of immaterial labor and fair distribution of rewards;
• Access and equality, and;
• The use of low cost labor and/or artificial intelligence.

Question 4

Digital commodities, contractual agreements and issues of ownership

Answer 4

“Digital media not only presents new opportunities for promoting and distributing material products and offline services; new markets have emerged whereby the ‘commodity’ exists only in digital form.”

In acquiring, using and accessing many digital goods consumers must agree to terms set out in enduser license agreements (EULAs) and terms of use/service contracts, which typically include a range of restrictions on their ownership of these items. Watkins et al. (2016) speculate that a lack of knowledge/understanding of their ownership rights may result in the formation of assumptions based on existing understandings of the relationship between possession and ownership.

This issue stems from a disparity whereby a corporation regards its’ offering as access to a service, but the consumer comes to perceive the same digital item as a possession.

Question 5

Exploitation of immaterial labor and fair distribution of rewards

Answer 5

Prosumer-reliant business models have emerged in the digital economy whereby the consumer or ‘prosumer’ largely produces the digital objects that they subsequently consume

Consequently, many digital consumption objects created in part by the consumer may not be fully owned by them

Question 6

Access and equality

Answer 6

Organizations have recently started adopting web content accessibility guidelines to address a social issue (equal access to vulnerable groups) and to ensure compliance with the law (e.g. the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995; the Disability Act 2001). We might see this as comparable with responsible companies that ensure equal assess to buildings, jobs, and services. But the use of technology by corporations may still disadvantage certain groups of individuals (the old, and the poor especially) in terms of access to offers, interaction, or customer services. This extends the issues of the ‘digital divide’ that have already been established (for example the focus on political engagement)

Question 7

Labor, use of low cost and/or artificial intelligence

Answer 7

If our illustrations so far have hinted at how the adoption of technology by organizations may be dehumanizing, this is most obviously seen in aspects of labor.

We might first consider the use of technology to extend the working day and workspace of employees. Various reports show how the use of smartphone, tablet and laptop technologies result in employees adopting 24/7 work practices, answering work emails in the evening, weekends and whilst on holiday because technology makes them always available.

Alternatively, the Internet has allowed various forms of casualization of labor (Uber, Air B&B), celebrated under various ideas such as access-based consumption, the ‘sharing economy’, or crowdsourcing, with new services often described as in opposition to the established businesses which are now accused of merely protecting their own businesses models in order to maintain unreasonable profits. Yet these new businesses deny their employees many of the usual employment rights (as well as evading much legislation, for example on access, see above).