575As we have seen, information technology (IT) is becoming a core resource for organizations in today’s global
economy and is affecting, if not determining, what organizations produce and how they are managed. Anyone with
casual familiarity with today’s news knows that IT is influencing the whole of society, not just the business arena.
Today’s younger generation can hardly conceive of living without the smartphone, Facebook, Twitter,
communication satellites, and the Internet. IT is rapidly changing our lives, and this process of change is ongoing.
The information revolution is often compared with the industrial revolution in terms of the overall impact that the
industrial revolution had on civilization.
In spite of all the benefits that IT has brought, it has also given rise to a number of troubling social problems,
including loss of privacy, intellectual property issues, identity theft, spam, sexual exploitation of children,
obsolescence of workers’ skills, global outsourcing of jobs, and deterioration of working conditions. Some of the
computer crimes that create these social problems, such as viruses and worms, were discussed in Chapter 14. In
this chapter, we will explore a number of social issues and consider their ethical and legal implications.
In the next section, we discuss the legal environment as it relates to IT. Then we explore some ways to analyze
social problems from an ethical perspective, after which we consider the ethical and legal dimensions of a number
of social problems.
The Legal Environment
In dealing with the use of IT, individuals and organizations must work within a complex legal environment. This
legal environment is incomplete and sometimes less than satisfactory, yet it is a manager’s duty to know and obey
the existing laws. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
The purpose of law is to constrain behavior within a society so that its needs are satisfied and harm within it
is prevented. Thus, law is related to, but not necessarily identical to, ethics. Laws are rules that must be obeyed, but
it is difficult to write a rule that applies to every possible situation, especially in the case of IT, which is changing
so rapidly. Also, laws must be enforceable—there must be meaningful sanctions that are invoked if the law is bro-
ken. A law that cannot be enforced or that people will not obey simply engenders a lack of respect for all law.
The digital age has put great strain on the legal system. IT has made new forms of crime, such as identity
theft, feasible. And it has changed the mechanisms for reproducing printed material, photos, art, and music to the
point where what was once laborious and expensive has become a simple matter of downloading from the Web.
Technology has evolved quite rapidly, and the legal system has inevitably lagged behind.
The first reaction has been to try to reinterpret existing laws to apply to new conditions, which they often do
not quite fit. Then writing and adopting new laws takes time, and it is hard to write a law that exactly suits the prob-
lem, especially when the problems are always changing. It might take a number of iterations before a satisfactory
law emerges.