However, most of the issues explored relate to B2B or B2C relations, or to e-businesses within their strategic, regulatory and legal environments. Issues such as data mining and profiling, customer and business-critical information protection and privacy, intellectual property rights in a digital economy, or advertizing and spamming, to name but a few, are well covered in the existing literature (Danna & Gandy, 2002 Davenport & Harris 2007 Palmer, 2005 Roman, 2007 Stead & Gilbert, 2001). Previous research on ethical issues in e-business mainly addresses the relation of e-businesses to their external environment. The adoption of technologies is not morally neutral, and the emergence of the new electronic communication systems has come along with, or has favored, new attitudes and behaviors, giving rise to new ethical concerns.
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In particular, many organizations and their employees seem to have been overwhelmed by a number of issues arising from the usage of electronic communications in the professional environment. While ICTs have dramatically improved business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumers (B2C) communications, they have also significantly impacted our day-to-day personal and professional lives. There is little doubt that electronic communications, and in particular e-mail, have introduced a paradigm shift in management, organizational and working methods, as well as in business performance, as they have in the economy in general. On the user side, 99% of employees declared they were using e-mail professionally, against 80% for fixed-line telephony and 76% for mobile phone use (Dimension Data, 2007).īecause of the specific nature of e-businesses, as early adopters of ICTs as the underlying infrastructure and tools supporting their business models, the trend towards a heavier usage of computer-mediated communications (CMC) and in particular e-mail is particularly visible in the e-commerce and on-line industry. 96% of the researched organizations declared that they offered access to e-mail in the workplace to their employees, 91% to a conventional fixed-line telephone line, and 86% to a professional mobile phone. The web and the Internet have also changed the way we communicate and interrelate, both in our private sphere and in the office.ĭuring the past decade, according to a survey conducted by Dimension Data, electronic mail (e-mail) has become the most popular communication tool in the professional environment, outpacing fixed and mobile telephony. The digitization of information and communication technologies (ICTs), the world-wide extension of ICT-based networks, services and applications, and in particular of the Internet and of the World Wide Web, have paved the road and made possible the correlated development of e-business. They should therefore assess their internal situation and develop and enforce e-mail policies accordingly. E-businesses, as early adopters of information and communication technologies, are being particularly exposed to such behaviors, since they rely heavily on electronic communications. Other forms of unethical behavior find their roots in corporate culture, internal competition and management styles. Inexperience explains some users’ unethical behavior.
These specificities give rise to misunderstanding, misconduct in the absence of the interlocutors, information and mail overload, as well as privacy infringement and misuse of shared computing resources. Electronic communications, because of their specific nature, raise a number of ethical issues: e-mail communications are distance, asynchronous, text-based, and interactive computer-mediated communications and allow for storage, retrieval, broadcast and manipulation of messages. AbstractE-mail has become the most popular communication tool in the professional environment.