Inhaltsverzeichnis
High Corporate Responsibility Standards and Reallocated Monitoring Costs
Von: Jan-Frieder Damm and Felix C. Schweren
This paper presents a new game theoretical approach to reduce and reallocate the costs of monitoring supply chains in the telecommunication industry. The complex structure of supplier relations is understood as tiers of production. These can be seen as markets in which the suppliers act as competitors. This structure opens the approach to shift monitoring costs from the producer to the actors on the lower tiers where compliance with an existing code of ethics is a requirement so as not to suffer from market exclusion. The suppliers have an incentive to identify competitors who defect in order to benefit from their foreclosure. Thus, the monitoring costs which are shifted from one final producer reverse the supply chain. By using game theoretical modelling, this structure of individual incentives is backed and proven to function under certain assumptions. The paper’s approach is of relevance for the telecommunication industry, which becomes apparent when considering joint efforts in the branch.
Privacy Matters
Von: Ute Wiemer and Katharina Elkhanova
This paper provides an ethical as well as a strategic foundation for the protection of privacy as a unique value in the telecommunication sector. We provide a detailed definition of the term privacy, also taking into account its origins. Based on a specified definition of privacy for the digital telecommunication sector, relevant sources of conflicts and trade-offs are pointed out. Next, we focus on the ethical legitimation of privacy and show that it is a necessary condition for the autonomy of individuals. By analysing different concepts of autonomy, we highlight why autonomy and, therefore privacy are worth protecting. From this, we derive normative implications for the telecommunication sector. After proving that there is a moral obligation for companies to protect their customers’ privacy, we will show that it is also economically and strategically recommendable for companies to do so. We identify several explicit strategic implications for companies to implement privacy in the existing framework. Lastly, we examine two practical examples of communication companies that successfully use privacy as a unique value proposition and evaluate them.
Stakeholders at Stake
Von: Jurij Pfeiffer and Raphael Zumsteg
In business ethics, corporate social responsibility implicitly goes hand in hand with stakeholder theory. The normative stakeholder approach states that an organisation has a set of moral obligations not only towards its shareholders but towards stakeholder groups as well. Apart from the theory’s omnipresence and its assumed simplicity, companies struggle to establish or to comply with these moral obligations. In this paper, we question if the stakeholder framework is most suitable to model an organisation’s social responsibility. As a promising alternative, we introduce the market failures approach by Joseph Heath. It states that an organisation’s moral obligation is to maximise profit under the condition that it refrains from taking advantage of market failures. We choose the telecommunications industry as a sample to apply the market failure framework. Our application shows that in a non-ideal market, the market failures framework is difficult to apply due to its demanding Pareto criterion. We propose a modified criterion – ‘justifiability to each’. It aims to render the market failures approach useful in non-ideal markets and open it up for managerial recognition in putting an organisation’s social responsibility into practice.
Graceful Simplicity
Von: Anna Isabelle Ette, Laura Schelling, and Sebastian Weiss
In this paper, we demonstrate how in times of excessive, inconsiderate consumption, deliberate limitation of production may be a device to enhance a company’s economical, ecological and social revenue. In order to map out this idea, we focus on sufficiency as the most powerful element of sustainability theory. We start by reviewing some aspects of Aristotle’s ethics of virtue. Robert Solomon’s contribution is taken to translate Aristotle’s ancient instructions into modern days’ business ethics: The aim of entrepreneurship ought to produce valuable satisfiers rather than a thoughtlessly put-together range of products leading to profit maximisation. With Solomon’s backup, we argue that a company’s entrepreneurial strategies must reflect its duty and willingness to care for its employees, to produce responsibly and to compensate for external effects. Sufficiency policies may serve companies as key notes for veritable, sustainable growth and should be reintegrated in their corporate governance.
A Corporate Social Responsibility Profile for the Telecommunication Industry
Von: Matthias Meller and Sebastian Zimmer
The article examines the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) from both the current academic and economic perspectives and offers an overview of common CSR objectives and best practices. The objectives are arranged into a matrix that serves as an initial point to develop a CSR strategy. Clearly, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to it. Instead, this article argues that there is a necessity to craft an industry-specific CSR strategy based on the defined needs and characteristics of a particular branch. For this purpose, this paper refers to the telecommunication industry and recommends core elements for suitable CSR strategies. The recommendation refers to an actual example: Blackberry, a major company in this industry. By analysing similarities and differences to the environment BlackBerry is operating in, the paper closes with advice for BlackBerry’s CSR strategy.