Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility, and regulation
Time and place:–,
NEMKO Kitchen
Juho Lindman
In this seminar, Juho Lindman will talk about the economic dominance of large Internet tech companies, specifically the ‘Big Five’ (Google, Apple, Meta ne ́e Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft), is fundamentally complicating the organization of society. Their positions raise profound questions, old and new, at the intersection of information systems and political philosophy, where companies have traditionally appeared in liberal democracies as economic operators rather than powerful political actors that threaten to limit citizens’ fundamental rights significantly through their operations. Notably, the traditional understanding of corporate social responsibility is rooted in the liberal-democratic conception of moral labor’s division between public and private powers in a market economy. Focussing on this division, the paper analyses the various types of political power these companies wield and the complexities of regulating that power. Thus, it contributes to the IS discipline’s theoretical discussion by introducing political theory concepts that hold untapped potential for reconciling Big Tech and modern liberal-democratic conceptions of society. Taking these concepts as underpinnings for discussing six types of power, in turn (business vs. politics, democratic government, institutions of a market economy, companies, civil society, and citizens), the paper offers the discipline example research questions to tackle and points to potential directions for scholarship.
Juho Lindman is a full Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Applied IT at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and the director of the University of Gothenburg Blockchain Lab. In 2019, Juho was a visiting scholar with the SCANCOR-Weatherhead Partnership at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States). Juho was a SCANCOR scholar (Stanford, US) in 2012 and 2015 and a visiting research scholar at the London School of Economics (United Kingdom) in 2010. In the field of information systems, his current research focuses on open-source software development, blockchain governance, open data, and organizational change.
