We areliving in an era where the globalization and connectivity of new technologiesin the business world and the everyday life of society are increasingly united,in recent years have witnessed a tremendous transformation in the relationshipbetween business and society.
Today we talk about corporate socialresponsibility; “Edward Freeman initiated what is known as stakeholdertheory: if the shareholders own the company, there are also employees,suppliers, consumers, customers and a community that has rights over thecompany” (latercera.com, 2011). In this case, weare analyzing how Telefonica interact with the society and how it develops withresponsibility social. Telefónicais a company that develops itself in the telecommunications sector havingpresence in Europe and Latin America reaching to be in 21 countries (Telefonica, 2017), Telefónica is acompany that conforms to the demands of the present society offering the meansof communication between the people, supplying the high standards of technologyin a reliable way. The innovation has been for Telefónica a position for thedevelopment of talent and entrepreneurship as the main key for the revolutionof the digital technology; therefore, the company has created a global programdesigned to link entrepreneurs, startups, investors, public and privateentities around the globe, integrating support initiatives in innovation andentrepreneurship. Its main objective is to guide innovation in the developmentof viable projects through funding to such projects; for that reason, telephonecontributes to society not only providing telephony, television, and internet services but also making contributions toentrepreneurs innovating for the development of new products, new areas ofoperations as well as betting on open software as a key to the change process. Thereare six spheres of power which “Economic power and political power are two dominant power but there are four spheres that includesocial and cultural power, individual power, technological power, andenvironment power” (Carrol & Buchholtz, 2014), during the study of the company Telefonicain the sphere of power, it is possible to determine that in the sphere ofcorporate power where they are affected is in the individual part becauseTelefonica has presence in 23 countries the inequality of working conditions among these countries, positions, internal andexternal workers; since in some countries there are work positions that aredeveloped by company personnel who obtain benefits from the organization that is granted by the headquarters in Spain and in other countries by government policythe same job are developed by third persons who do not enjoy the benefits,generating an anti-ethical gap in the social responsibility policies that Telefonicahas for its employees; in addition, another problem in the sphere of corporatepower presented to Telefonica is technological because of the digital dividefor full access to telecommunications services, since it directly impacts ruralareas excluding the inhabitants of those areas to the potential benefitsoffered by the digital revolution, “Telefonica’sobjective is to increase investment in new projects and involve the publicadministration to bridge the gap between populated and rural areas” (Telefonica, 2016). Accordingto Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in the year 2015, the use of the internet for Latin Americawas 43% of households (Fernando, Poveda, & Grimblatt, 2016) and a population of64 million people who still do not have access to mobile broadband (Telefonica, 2016).
For this reason, Telefonica has invested 343 million euros in universal service in sevenLatin American countries to provide telecommunications services to the ruralareas of those countries, so in my opinion Telefonica is managing to improve itsweakness it presents in the technological sphere by making economiccontributions to integrate rural communities with technology and meet itsobjectives of bridging the digital divide, prioritizing in the technologicalsphere power.
