Managing Web Usage in the Workplace: A Social, Ethical and Legal Perspective

Citation

Mason, D. (2003), "Managing Web Usage in the Workplace: A Social, Ethical and Legal Perspective", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 455-456. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310510145

One of the consequences of the breakneck pace of Internet development and the adoption of e‐commerce is that the businesses environment has failed to keep up with developments. The technology is changing relentlessly, but business policies and management attitudes are not keeping pace. New business and personal applications are being invented daily, some opening up wonderful new opportunities, others creating ugly new crimes. Without central control or any overall strategy the Internet has grown to be the world's information infrastructure. For many people today, work without the Internet, with its email and instant online access, is unthinkable, even impossible.

The new paradigm raises novel and complex issues. The business of doing business has changed forever, yet few companies have formal processes for policy creation, and even fewer actually have coherent strategies in place. Moreover, the Internet is not only the marketplace where business‐to‐business and business‐to‐consumer transactions take place, it is also the world's biggest playground. Personal email, chat rooms, eBay, sports scores and every other online delight are just a click away on the desktop, and millions of employees daily fritter away countless hours of their employer's time and money. Those companies who have bothered to check – and most don't – have been horrified to find that 90 per cent of sites accessed have nothing to do with work and, as well as the loss of productivity, have found their networks clogged with spam and porn, and company secrets being discussed freely.

These developments have prompted a growing interest in understanding and managing Internet access at work. Many companies have access restrictions in place, and some have dismissed workers for inappropriate use, but most accept that their policies are failing.

This book is a collection of 18 academic articles that address the legal, social and ethical aspect of Internet use in the workplace. It is organised into three sections. Section 1, “Factors influencing personal use”, includes three excellent articles that take a high‐level view of the problems and issued. One argues that the problem belongs to senior management and in fact is largely caused by their inability to understand the technology and how it is used. Two others see the problem as a misunderstanding of the social nature of the workplace, or with fundamental ethical attitudes in the workforce. The remaining three are a poor fit with the overall aim of the book: one discusses the spread of the Internet into sub‐Saharan Africa, and the other two are tests of the technology acceptance model as applied to the user interfaces of e‐commerce Web sites. The second section, “Consequences of Internet usage”, has some excellent papers. The first takes a social informatics view of the issues based on four case studies; the second is an interesting review of online gambling in the workplace. There is one good paper on measuring performance in telecommuting applications, and the final paper is a superficial survey linking job satisfaction with Internet usage satisfaction.

The third section, “Development of policies”, contains an interesting mix of subjects. It starts with two fairly technical articles on the architectural topology of networks. Three articles address security issues, one directly and one using case studies to illustrate ways of reducing legal and operational risks, with a third on using accounting policies to reduce Internet abuse. One case discusses access to the Internet from the point of view of the disabled user. The final two articles take distinctly off‐beat looks at issues using social theories as frameworks of analysis. One uses a critical social perspective and gives a good overview of the relevant literature. The other is a novel deconstructionist treatment of email and its users that will make people view the humble email address with a new respect.

Overall, the book offers an interesting and sometimes intriguing collection of articles, most well written and informative, and forms an excellent resource for studies in this field.