Business Under Threat, Technology Under Attack, Ethics Under Fire: The Experience of Google in China
Justin Tan () and
Anna Tan ()
Journal of Business Ethics, 2012, vol. 110, issue 4, 469-479
Abstract:
Although not frequently regarded as controversial, digital communications industries continue to be sites of CSR conflicts, particularly internationally. Investigating CSR issues in the digital communications industry is pertinent because in addition to being one of the fastest growing industries, it has created a host of new CSR issues that require further attention. This case study examines an incident in early 2010, when Google Inc. China and the Chinese government reached an impasse that produced a large-scale, transnational conflict that reached a head ostensibly over state-mandated censorship, ultimately prompting Google to withdraw from the mainland Chinese market and redirect its activities to Hong Kong. We track Google’s experience in China, both to explore its strategies and to consider the implications for corporate social responsibility. We situate Google’s drastic decision to withdraw entirely from mainland China in the complex multiplicity of ethical, cultural, and political conflicts that affect this particular case. On a broader level, the incident raises the question of how multinational corporations (MNCs) can achieve corporate growth while negotiating the highly sensitive sociopolitical and institutional environments of foreign nations. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Keywords: Google; China; Corporate social responsibility; Business ethic; Internet search engine; Privacy; Copyright (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-012-1494-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:110:y:2012:i:4:p:469-479
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10551-012-1494-0
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman
More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().