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194 Part 1 Introduction

Activity 4.1 Introduction to social, legal and ethical issues

List all the social, legal and ethical issues that the manager of a sell-side e-commerce
web site needs to consider to avoid damaging relationships with users of his or her site
or which may leave the company facing prosecution. You can base your answer on
issues which may concern you, your friends or your family when accessing a web site.
Answers to activities can be found at www.pearsoned.co.uk/chaffey.

An indication of the challenge of assessing the macro-environment factors is presented in
Figure 4.1. This figure of the ‘waves of change’ shows how fluctuations in the characteristics
of different aspects of the environment vary at different rates through time. The manager
has to constantly scan the environment and assess which changes are relevant to their sphere
of influence. Changes in social culture and particularly pop culture (what’s hot and what’s
not) tend to be very rapid. Introduction of new technologies and changes in their popularity
tend to be frequent too and need to be assessed. Governmental and legal changes tend to
happen over longer timescales although, since this is only a generalization, new laws can be
introduced relatively fast. The trick for managers is to identify those factors which are
important in the context of e-commerce which are critical to competitiveness and service
delivery and monitor these. It is the technological and legal factors which are most impor-
tant to managing e-commerce, so we focus on these.
Since the law is one of the most important issues for the e-commerce manager to address
the six most important legal issues for managers to assess are introduced in Table 4.2. Each
Environmental
scanning of these is covered in more detail later in the chapter.
The process of Organizations that either do not monitor these environmental factors, or those that do
continuously monitoring not respond to them adequately will not remain competitive and may fail, as discussed at the
the environment and
events and responding start of Chapter 2 in the section on strategic agility. The process of monitoring the environ-
accordingly. ment is usually referred to as environmental scanning. This often occurs as an ad hoc

Pop culture

Social

Technology

Commerce

Government

Infrastructure:
road, railways

The natural
environment

Figure 4.1 ‘Waves of change’ – different timescales for change in the environment