Conceptualizing Corporate Digital Responsibility: A Digital Technology Development Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Abstract

The abstract lacks the main conclusions of your research, which would help increase the visibility and citation of the article.

Introduction

The introduction should give more focus on the scientific problem and the level of research of the problem, and the research of previous authors on the topic should be presented, which would allow justification of the scientific problem. Since the introduction has been written in a very confusing way, a more detailed presentation of the level of research into the topic would be an advantage. It remains unclear what the purpose of your article is – either conceptualization of a new definition, CDR measurement (measurement for CDR), or relationship between CDR and digital outcomes. It seems the purpose of your article is the measurement, therefore it should be presented more clearly.

Literature Review

The literature review is only of narrative nature. It remains unclear what the novelty or uniqueness of the theme under analysis is. Authors should justify aspects of digital responsibility (not only presented in the table), the concept and components of digital development, and explain what are the connections between digital responsibility and digital technology development. And what new aspects have you generated?

 

Overall, the theoretical part should be structured more clearly, which would allow to justify the relevance of the topic under consideration and show the readiness of the authors to conduct research:

 

Research methodology

The research methodology is incomplete: the logic and consistency of the research are not completely clear. How many and what tests did you do and in what order? What is the purpose of each study? Does your survey of 5 experts qualify for a qualitative study?

The article lacks a justification for choosing a quantitative research method. The logic of the research questions is not presented, and the reliability of the research remains unclear (only two cities and high-tech companies were selected).

Why choose five experts based on the questionnaire? How can you scientifically justify that they are enough?

Discussion

The discussion should be expanded and the differences between your results and the results of the previous authors' research should be highlighted. Are there any such results? It is also recommended to discuss specific practical implications for managers.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewers and Editor,

We are very grateful for the opportunity to revise our paper. Thank you very much for your thoughtful and helpful comments. We are happy to see that, despite the critical remarks, you also saw potential in our paper.

Following your recommendations and suggestions, we have made an extensive revision of the manuscript. The paper is also thoroughly proofread to rectify any grammatical and typographical errors. We also provide detailed responses to the editors’ and reviewers’ comments. For easy identification, we used “track changes” function of WORD to mark major revisions in the manuscript. Referee comments are in italics in this response. We hope the revised manuscript meets the publication standards for Sustainability.

Thanks again for your recommendations.

 

Kind regards,

Author Team

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewers and Editor,

We are very grateful for the opportunity to revise our paper. Thank you very much for your thoughtful and helpful comments. We are happy to see that, despite the critical remarks, you also saw potential in our paper.

Following your recommendations and suggestions, we have made an extensive revision of the manuscript. The paper is also thoroughly proofread to rectify any grammatical and typographical errors. We also provide detailed responses to the editors’ and reviewers’ comments. For easy identification, we used “track changes” function of WORD to mark major revisions in the manuscript. Referee comments are in italics in this response. We hope the revised manuscript meets the publication standards for Sustainability.

Thanks again for your recommendations.

Kind regards,

Author Team

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The article has been corrected

Author Response

Thank you for accepting our article and thank you for your great advice and assistant. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the revised version of the manuscript, which addresses some but not all shortcomings of the first version of the paper. First of all, there is no answer or comments to my review. Second, many of the points I raised still need to be revised. I wonder if my review did not reach the authors due to a technical error, or whether there is some other good reason why I do not see any answers or rebuttal for the issues I raised. Some important issues (e.g., measurement of firm’s digital performance) seem to have been ignored.
Even so, I note that the second version of the manuscript is somewhat improved versus the original version. However, I recommend the authors to consider revisiting following addressable shortcomings that currently still limit the value of the paper:

 

0. GENERAL NOTE: In this paper the authors focus on the conceptualization of CDR only in terms of data-related practices!!! Accordingly, please make clear in the paper that other facets of CDR (including education, access, redress mechanisms, transparency, etc.) are not subject of discussion. Consequently, the authors should not speak of “conceptualization of CDR” but rather of “conceptualization of CDR with respect to data collection and processing”. This is essential since the concept of CDR encompasses various other aspects which are equally important.
Respectively, please **remove** any:

-        statements that criticize unilateral perspectives on CDR (e.g., “Most previous studies have usually focused on one aspect of CDR”)– since the authors present a unilateral facet/aspect of CDR too – i.e., authors focus on the data collection and processing perspective only.

-        claims of having developed a multidimensional view on CDR – e.g., “Compared to existing researches (Capurro, 2018; Kshetri, 2014; Ritter & Pedersen, 2020), a multidimensional view of CDR will help researchers sort out the main issues of CDR in digital strategy.”

1. INTRODUCTION

·       In the introduction the authors state that “the concept of CDR was formally proposed by Lobschat et al. until 2019”. This is not entirely correct. I believe it was Cooper et al., in 2015, who first coined the term Corporate Digital Responsibility.

Cooper, T., Siu, J. and Wei, K. (2015). Corporate digital responsibility - Doing well by doing good. URL: https://www.criticaleye.com/inspiring/insights-servfile.cfm?id=4431

·       The research goal stated in the second last paragraph of the Introduction should be moved towards the front section of the introduction (i.e. “our objectives are to develop a new conceptualization of CDR from digital technology development perspective on the basis of previous literature and create measures of CDR to test the importance of CDR in terms of corporate digital performance”, so the readership knows from the beginning what the research goal of the paper is.
Additionally, please explain clearly but in brief why it is important to address this research goal. I have a potential suggestion in this regard: As I gather, the conceptualization of CDR in this manuscript is revolving around handling and processing of data, without considering any other aspects of CDR such as consumer education, access, governance mechanisms. Accordingly, it might make sense to motivate your research goal with the importance of data as a production factor essential to create value in the digital realm. CDR envisions that companies engage in ethical and responsible business activities that go beyond current regulatory requirements on data privacy and security. As the concept of CDR is only nascent, we still lack a detailed and structured conceptualization of CDR with regard to ethical and responsible data-related practices.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

·       Please state where the “descriptive function, normalized function and shaped function” come from. Please reference works who coined the term. If there are not any, then state whether these functions are derived from the literature review.

·       Throughout the paper there is no real connection between the three functions of technology and digitization /digitalization. Please make this connection clear, since the three functions of technology seem essential for the data-related CDR conceptualization proposed by the authors.

3. CONCEPTUALIZATION OF CDR

·       At the beginning of the section, the authors explain digitization and digitalization and state that: “These two stages correspond exactly to the characteristics three functions of digital technology and are crucial to organizations in implementing a digital strategy”. Please elaborate on how exactly and why digitization and digitalization relate to the descriptive, normalized and shaped function of technology. Provide some reference(s) for these statements.

4. METHODS

·       As already mentioned regarding the first version of the manuscript: The empirical support of the topic has not been motivated. The Methods section appears out of nowhere, without the authors having lost one word on why we need to conduct a study, why this empirical investigation is meaningful and necessary and the goal has not been clearly worked out up to this point, so that the reader will have to figure this out as we go along.
The paragraph the authors added does not sufficiently motivate/explain why an empirical assessment is necessary and what is the contribution it can offer. Please elaborate on the empirical assessment more thoroughly.

·       The final valid sample consisted of 202 respondents – please state whether these were from different companies or some individuals represented the same company? What was individuals’ role in the companies?

MEASUREMENT/ INDICATORS for CDR with respect to data collection and processing

·       Provide references for the indicators in Table 4.

·       Regarding the measurement of performance: Please provide more arguments and support for why it makes sense to measure firm performance the way the authors did. At the moment, I think that this is a very subjective assessment of one's own success and accordingly possible biases. Shouldn't something like this, for example, be judged on the basis of more objective indicators, such as for instance a company’s value? If the authors cannot provide any references or measurement scales for the used digital performance measures they should argue the choice of the items in a more complete fashion. This is important because the authors use their analysis to derive various implications of their work.

·       The practical implications presented in the current version of the paper remain rather general. Based on the empirical evaluation in this article, then a much more detailed and concrete recommendations for action could be presented.

 

Besides these issues that still exist in the manuscript, there are some minor style issues (e.g., formatting issues (different sized and formatted text)) that need to be fixed. Please let a native English speaker read over the manuscript to ensure that the writing style in the paper is improved. Unfortunately, the new version of the manuscript still has various style issues. I list some exemplary style issues below, along with suggestions for improvement:

·       “However, most of previous researches focus on one aspect of CDR but neglect analyzing CDR …” consider changing into: “However, most of prior research efforts focus…”.

·       “Besides, empirical researches about the measure of CDR were limited.” consider changing into: “Besides, empirical research on how to measure CDR remain limited.”

·       “Therefore, based on combing extant research about corporate responsibility in digital realm from three functions of digital technology this article conceptualizes CDR into corporate digitized responsibility and corporate digitalized responsibility from two phases of digital technology development (i.e., digitization stage and digitalization stages).” —this sentence is too long and unclear. Hence, the authors should consider changing it into: “Therefore, by combing insights from extant research on corporate responsibility in the digital realm, this article proposes to distinguish between “corporate digitized responsibility” and “corporate digitalized responsibility.”

 

Please review the manuscript thoroughly or provide counter-arguments why changes should not be made. I am still convinced that with a bit more effort the manuscript can provide an interesting perspective on CDR with respect to the data collection and processing. Thus, I genuinely hope that my comments will help the authors advance and improve their paper.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the kind words and for the opportunity to revise and resubmit our work. Attached is our response letter. Thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

I commend the authors for their efforts to improve their manuscript, which I believe is now ready to be accepted.
Thank you for the opportunity to accompany this interesting manuscript. I wish the authors success for the future!