The Social Cost of Social Value Creation - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 378

taxing fiscal entity. The self-imposed and self-
regulated responsibilities may prove inadequate
in the long run. They may reveal discriminatory
in yet unanticipated ways. They may be yield yet
unrecognized exposure and ultimately discredit
the model. And they may macroeconomically
suboptimally allocate the proceeds of the redistri-
bution. In all they are merely subject to the biased
control of one single of the involved entities, the
shareholder constituency, but otherwise escape
responsibility on the part of the other stakeholders
and sidestep public scrutiny.

nature” of CITI firms based on a composite of
empirical data and critical theory. The alleged
activities of CITI firms are to a large extent unob-
servable and don't lend themselves easily to direct
empirical investigation. They could, however, be
captured via proxy metrics, such as market share,
regulatory disputes, and public action. A neces-
sary next step is to juxtapose the results of such
quantifiable and qualifiable data with the ones
already available for positive feedback effects,
accelerated innovation, lock-in and switching cost
principles of networked and digital goods. Next
steps would proceed to collect and evaluate such
evidence. And in a further step yet, via abandoned
projects or firm failures in the industry, assessing
for example the number of firms or innovations
that never reach their tipping point, one may be
able to quantify social costs and potential losses
of social value.

concLusion

The empirical data of our more than two year's
inquiry into 'the new nature of the firm' has been
increasingly inconclusive as to the social effi-
cacy of the major and most prominent Complex
Information Technology-Intensive firms. While
at first we expected to be able to simply identify
some elements and substantial components of a
paradigmatically motivated new framework for
the CITI firm, we are increasingly concerned
with the paradoxical effects of the existence of
these firms. In the above we have attempted to
capture these paradoxical effects as they affect the
nature of these firms and render its contributions
in terms of social value creation more and more
questionable. Not only are CITI defined by an
entirely different understanding of each one of the
constitutive design variables strategy, structure,
scale, scope, and social position, they indeed have
also to some extend skewed their definition and
their application resulting in an ambivalent nature
of the firm with ambiguous outcomes.

references

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Arakji, R. Y., & Lang, K.-R. (2007). Digital con-
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Brusoni, S., & Tronchetti-Provera, S. (2005). The
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LiMitAtions And
further reseArch

The present was a exploratory paper, outlining
the contours of what we labeled the “ambivalent