Thorsten Busch

Capabilities in, capabilities out: overcoming digital divides by promoting corporate citizenship and fair ICT

This conceptual article discusses strategies of corporations in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector and their role in the conflict over access to knowledge in the digital environment. Its main hypothesis is that ICT corporations are very capable actors when it comes to bridging digital divides in both developed and developing countries—maybe even the most capable actors. Therefore, it is argued that ICT corporations could use their capabilities to help citizens gain sustainable access to knowledge in order to enable them to lead self-sufficient lives. In a nutshell, capabilities are presented as both the input (capabilities of ICT corporations) as well as the output (capability building for empowering citizens) of corporate strategy-making focusing on fair ICT. Corporate citizenship is put forth as the theoretical concept bridging corporate strategies and access to knowledge: If ICT corporations act in accordance with their self-understanding of being ‘good corporate citizens’, they could be crucial partners in lessening digital divides and helping citizens gain access to knowledge. From the perspective of ‘integrative economic ethics’ (Ulrich 2008), it is argued that ICT corporations have good reason to actively empower citizens in both developed and developing countries by pursuing ‘inclusive’ strategies in many fields, such as open-source software development. That way, ICT corporations could enable, support and provide citizens with capabilities enabling them to help themselves. In order to make inclusive business models work, the rules and regulations companies find themselves in today must enable them to act responsibly without getting penalized by more ruthless competitors. This article explores several cases from the ICT field to illustrate the interplay between a responsible business model and the rules and regulations of the industry. From a capabilities perspective, the most desirable mix of corporate strategies and industry regulation is one that results in the highest level of generativity (Zittrain 2008). Thus, ICT should not be closed systems only driven by the company behind them. Instead, they need to be open for the highest possible level of third-party innovation.

Doing well by doing good? Normative tensions underlying Twitter’s corporate social responsibility ethos:

This article examines the rhetoric of Twitter.com in order to gain insight into the company’s normative self-understanding, or ethos. From a business ethics perspective, we analyze Twitter’s ethos in relation to debates around democratic communication and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Partly thanks to its CSR strategy, Twitter has acquired the critical mass of users necessary to successfully establish a robust and financially viable social network. Despite its success, however, we argue that Twitter does not sufficiently address three ethical implications of its strategy: (1) from an ethical perspective, Twitter mainly seems to employ an ‘instrumental CSR’ ethos that fails to properly recognize the moral rights, responsibilities, and strategic challenges of corporate actors with regard to their stakeholders; (2) this issue becomes all the more pressing because online social networks to a certain extent have taken on the role of quasi-governmental bodies today, regulating what their users can and cannot do, thus raising questions of accountability and legitimacy; and (3) in Twitter’s case, this leads to normative tension between the sites rhetoric, which is centered around civic motives, and the way its Terms of Service and licensing policies seem to favor its commercial stakeholders over its noncommercial ones.

Playing a Better Me: How Players Rehearse Their Ethos via Moral Choices

This article is an exploration of players’ understandings of games that offer moral dilemmas in order to explore player choice in tandem with game mechanics. We investigate how game structures, including the presence of choice, a game’s length, and avatar presentation, push players in particular ways and also how players use those systems for their own ends. We explore how players “rehearse their ethos” through gameplay and how they are continually pushing back against the magic circle. It is based on two-dozen semi-structured interviews with players conducted in 2012. It illustrates that there are no clear-cut answers—game structures, including narratives, character designs, length, or save systems, can push players to act in certain ways that may or may not align with their own beliefs and goals.