Corporate Responsibility Meets the Digital Economy

We examine how digital transformation of the economy may affect the field of corporate responsibility (CR) and whether some of its foundational assumptions need to be re-examined. Grounding our analysis in the relevant theory, we identify five key digital economic phenomena from a CR-relevant perspective, outline their associated ethical opportunities and threats, and map those opportunities and threats against three core questions that define the domain of the CR field: responsible for what, responsible towards whom, and who is responsible? We find that while there are foreseeable changes required of the field in relation to all three questions, it is the third one that poses the biggest challenges, questioning foundational assumptions on the allocation of responsibility (notably, that responsible entities are clearly identifiable and are human agents only). We develop a research agenda to address the concerns raised and conclude with a discussion of our contribution and its implications.