HKUST’s Jiatao Li is the chief author of a thoughtful and insightful commentary on the social responsibility of online platforms. Prof. Li’s paper, co-written with international collaborators, explores how the growing reach of multinational platforms (MNPs) necessitates new ways of thinking about ethical governance, transcending traditional frameworks developed in the era of multinational enterprises.

Digital globalization—the expansion of global commerce on lines laid out by Internet access—is a defining trend. International business (IB) researchers have been quick to delineate the impact of digitalization on commerce itself. Concurrently, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has moved to the research forefront. However, the authors note that “the lack of conversation between ... digitalization and [CSR] presents a valuable opportunity for extending the agenda.”

The need to connect our understanding of digitalization and CSR is not just an academic gap. MNPs—Meta, Airbnb, Uber, and others—are profoundly altering social relations worldwide through their sheer scale and integration into daily life. To capture the ethical importance of this trend in the context of IB, the authors introduce the concept of “ecosystem social responsibility (ESR),” which “arises from opportunities and expectations of social value co-creation.”

Unlike multinational enterprises, MNPs operate in a complex ecosystem of multifaceted relationships among platforms, users, sellers, and home and host countries, all with various claims on each other. The firms that operate MNPs cannot stand apart from the ethical dilemmas that their dominance creates; instead, they must tackle a series of ESR challenges, which the authors summarize in a collection of Insights and Future Research Questions.

Some MNPs are multidomestic, connecting users within countries, while others are truly global. All, however, have demonstrable real-world impacts at the national level. The challenge facing platform managers, policymakers, and IB researchers, note the authors, is to “further the concept of [ESR], as well as dissect the specific ways in which platform firms and ecosystem participants fulfill stakeholder expectations and address societal goals.”