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Constituents or Sub-Environments of Business Activity

15 January, 2016 - 09:08
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Paragraph summary of sub-environments of business followed by a table devoted to each one.

  • Technology including hardware, software, designs, prototypes, products, or services. Examples of engineering projects in Puerto Rico are provided in the PR STS grid. In the Therac-25 case, the hardware is the double pass accelerator, in Hughes the analogue-to-digital integrated circuits, and in Machado the UNIX software system and the computers in the UCI laboratories that are configured by this system. Because technologies are structured to carry out the intentions of their designers, they embed values.
  • Physical Surroundings. Physical surroundings can also embed values. Doors, by their weight, strength, material, size, and attachments (such as locks) can promote values such as security. Physical surroundings promote, maintain, or diminish other values in that they can permit or deny access, facilitate or hinder speech, promote privacy or transparency, isolate or disseminate property, and promote equality or privilege.
  • People, Groups, and Roles. This component of a STS has been the focus of traditional stakeholder analyses. A stakeholder is any group or individual which has an essential or vital interest in the situation at hand. Any decision made or design implemented can enhance, maintain, or diminish this interest or stake. So if we consider Frank Saia a decision-maker in the Hughes case, then the Hughes corporation, the U.S. Air Force, the Hughes sub-group that runs environmental tests on integrated circuits, and Hughes customers would all be considered stakeholders.
  • Procedures. How does a company deal with dissenting professional opinions manifested by employees? What kind of due process procedures are in place in your university for contesting what you consider to be unfair grades? How do researchers go about getting the informed consent of those who will be the subjects of their experiments? Procedures set forth ends which embody values and legitimize means which also embody values.
  • Laws, statutes, and regulations all form essential parts of STSs. This would include engineering codes as well as the state or professional organizations charged with developing and enforcing them
  • The final category can be formulated in a variety of ways depending on the specific context. Computing systems gather, store, and disseminate information. Hence, this could be labeled data and data storage structure. (Consider using data mining software to collect information and encrypted and isolated files for storing it securely.) In engineering, this might include the information generated as a device is implemented, operates, and is decommissioned. This information, if fed back into refining the technology or improving the design of next generation prototypes, could lead to uncovering and preventing potential accidents. Electrical engineers have elected to rename this category, in the context of power systems, rates and rate structures.

Technological Component

Component

Description

Examples

Frameworks

More Frameworks

Technological

Hardware: Machines of different kinds

Door (with tasks delegated to it such as automatically shutting and being locked)

Value Discovery (identifying and locating values in STS)

Social Constructionism: Restoring interpretive flexibility to reconstruct a technology to remove bias and realize value

 

Code that configures machines around human purposes

Power generating technologies based on renewable and nonrenewable resources

Value Translation (Operationalizing and implementing values in a STS by designing and carrying out a procedure)

Identifying and mitigating complexity in the form of tightly-coupled systems and non-linear causal chains

 

Technology can constrain business activity by de-skilling

Automobiles, computers, cell phones all of which have produced profound changes in our STSs

Value Verification (Using methods of participatory observation to determine how effectively values have been realized.)

De-centralizing control and authority

 

Technology, especially software, can instrument human action

Microsoft Office, Firefox Browser, Google Chrome, Google Docs, Social Networking software

Transperspectivity: discovering strands of construction of current STS; identifying possibilities for reconstruction

Designing to avoid the technological imperative and reverse adaptation (where humans abandon ends and serve the ends of technologies

Technological Component of STS

Ethical and Social Component

Component

Description

Examples

Frameworks

More Frameworks

Ethical Environment

Moral Constructs: Spheres of justice where distribution takes place according to context-dependent rules (Rules)

Basic Moral Concepts: rights, duties, goods, values, virtues, responsibility, and justice

Utilitarianism: Happiness is tied to maximizing the satisfaction of aggregated preferences.

Basic Capabilities: life, bodily health, bodily in tegrity

 

Social Constructs: Power and its distribu tion among groups

and individuals

Intermediate Moral Concepts: Privacy, Property, Informed Consent, Free Speech, due Process, Safety/Risk

Rights: Capacities of action that are essential to autonomy, vulnerable to standard threats, and corre lated with feasible duties

Cognitive Capabilities: Sense,

Imagination,

Thought; Emotion; Practical Reason

 

Right: A right is a capacity of action, essential to autonomy, that others are obliged to recognize and respect.

Privacy: If the information is directly relevant to the relation to the holder and the seeker, then it is not private.

Virtues: Settled dispositions toward choosing the mean between extremes of excess and defect. (Courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness)

Social Capabilities: Affiliations, Other Species

 

Duty: A duty is a principle that obliges us to recognize and respect the rights of others.

Property: That with which I mix my labor is mine. Intellectual property is non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

Capabilities Approach: For Nussbaum, capabilities answer the question, "What is this person able to do or be?" For Sen, capabilities are "'substantial freedoms,' a set of (causally interrelated) opportunities to choose and act."

Capabilities that address vulnerabilities: Play and Control over one's environment

Ethical Environments of the socio-technical system

Physical Surroundings

PhysicalSurroundings

Description

Examples

Frameworks

Frameworks

 

Physical environment imposes constraints (limits) over actions that restrict possibilities and shape implementation.

Influence of rivers, mountains, and valleys on social and economic activities such as travel, trade, economic and agricultural activity, commerce, industry, and manufacturing.

Classroom environment enables or constrains different teaching and learning styles. For example, one can pair of technically enhanced and technically challenged classrooms with student-centered and teacher-centered pedagogical styles and come up with four different learning environments. Each constrains and enables a different set of activities.

The physical arrangement of objects in the classroom as well as the borders created by walls, doors, and cubicles can steer a class toward teacher-centered or student-centered pedagogical styles.

This table summarizes the physical environment of the STS and how it can constrain or enable action.

People, Groups, and Roles (Stakeholders)

Stakeholders

Description

Examples

Frameworks

Frameworks

 

Any group or individual that has a vital interest at play (at stake) in the STS.

Market Stakeholders: Employees, Stockholders

Non-Market Stakeholders: communities, activist groups and NGOs

Role: The place or station a stakeholder occupies in a given organizational system and the associated tasks or responsibilities.

   

customers, suppliers retailers/wholesalers, creditors

business support groups, governments, general public (those impacted by projects who do not participate directly in their development

Interests: Goods, values, rights, interests, and preferences at play in the situ ation which the stakeholder will act to protect or promote.

   

(Distinction between market and non-market stakeholders comes from Lawrence and Weber, Business and Society: Stakeholders, Ethics, Public Policy, 12th edition. McGraw-Hill, 14-15.

Alliances are discussed by Patricia Werhane et al., Alleviating Poverty Through Profitable Partnerships: Globalization, Markets, and Economic Wellbeing. Routledge (2009).

Relation: Each stakeholder is related to other stakeholders in an alliance and each relation is tied to goods and values.

This table shows the social or stakeholder environment of the STS. A stakeholder is any group or individual that has a vital interest at play in the STS.

Procedural Environment

Procedural

Description

Examples

Framework

Framework

 

A series of interrelated actions carried out in a particular sequence to bring about a desired result, such as the realization of a value. Procedures can schematize value by setting out a script for its realization.

Hiring a new employee: (a) settling on and publishing a job description; (b) soliciting and reviewing applications from candidates; (c) reducing candidate list and interviewing finalists; (d) selecting a candidate; (e) tendering that candidate a job offer. Other procedures: forming a corporation, filing for bankruptcy, gaining consent to transfer TGI and PII to a third party (Toysmart: opt-in and opt-out procedures).

Value Realization Process in Software Engineering: (a) Discovery: Uncovering values shared by a given

community; (b)

Translation: operationalizing and implementing values in a given STS; (c) Verification: using methods of participatory observation (surveys and interviews) to validate that the values in question have been discovered and translated.

Challenging the Statement of Values: (a) A stakeholder group raises a conceptual, translation, range, or development issue; (b) Group presents their challenge and response to other stakeholders; (c) If other stakeholder groups agree, then the challenge leads to a revision in the SOV; (d) Community as a whole approves the revision.

Legal Environment: Laws, Statutes, Regulations

Laws, Statutes, Regulations

Description

Examples

Frameworks

Frameworks

 

Laws differ from ethical principles and concepts in that laws prescribe the minimally moral while ethi cal principles and concepts routinely explore higher moral "spaces."

Criminal Law: Applies to indi viduals; interested party in a criminal trial is society, not the victim.

Civil Law: Torts concern wrongful injury. The objective of a tort is to make the victim "while" after an injury.

US and British law work through a common law system where current decisions are based on past decisions or precedent.

 

Ethical principles challenge and criticize laws by bringing into question their normative content.

Involves proving a mens rea (guilty mind) and actus reus (guilty or law-breaking act) and that the mens rea caused the actus reus.

To prevail in a tort one must prove (in order of severity) negligence, recklessness, or intent.

The Puerto Rican

system of law is based on the Napoleonic code where decisions relate directly to existing law and statute and precedent plays a weaker role.

 

Laws can challenge ethical principles and concepts by raising issues of practicality. Also, as in responsibility theory, the law can structure and inform the moral discussion.

Criminal law does not apply to corporations because they have no soul to damn and no body to kick Baron Thurlow

Negligence involves proving that the defendant failed to meet some standard of due care.

Question: How does the statute-based Napoleonic system in PR constrain and enable business practice in relation to other systems such as the British and American common law systems?

     

Contract law concerns the violation of the terms of a contract.

 

Market Environment

Market Environment

Description

Examples

Frameworks

Frameworks

 

Business takes place within different markets that shape supply, demand, and price. Globalization frequently requires that a business be adept at operating across different markets

Laissez Faire: Each economic unit makes choice based on rational (enlightened) self-interest. (Private ownership of goods.)

Assumptions of a Free Market System: Indi vidual decisions are aggregated. Information flows through price structure.

Recent economic studies of the limits of laissez faire markets:

 

Liberal use made here of notes from Economics class taught by CR Winegardner, University of Toledo, 1971-1972

Liberal Democratic Socialism: Limited government intervention is needed to improve upon the choice of individual economic units. (Mixture of private and public ownership)

Free association. Absence of force or fraud. Individual agents are rational utility maximizer

Information Asymmetries (as studied by Stiegliz). Monopolies which, in the absence of competition, can dictate standards of price, product and service.

 

Materials also take from Natural Capitalism from Lovins and Hawkings.

Communist, Authoritarian Socialism: The state is in the best position to know what choices and policies are beneficial for the economy as a whole and its component parts. (Public ownership of goods and services)

(4,4)

(4,5)

(5,1)

(5,2)

(5,3)

(5,4)

(5,5)