Queixes i actuacions d’ofici iniciades amb l’Ajuntament

The ICT industry is wide and consists of companies that provide services and devices for

consumers and other businesses. The case companies need to represent some kind of an entity and be sufficiently comparable with each other.

I wanted to find case companies that operate in relatively comparable business contexts in a sector that most readers can relate to and that represent the development issues related to the ICT field well enough. Manufacturing of PC devices is thus considered suitable for the purposes of this study:

PCs are both consumer products and equipment that many uses for work. Quite often, not much information is available about the PCs’ impacts on development, and at work many cannot influence which PCs they use.

Large international companies, in turn, were chosen because of their wide development impacts through their operations. Also, one important factor in choosing the companies is that they uttered an intention to implement the SDGs. After consideration, I decided that if I study my own

employer, the risks of being biased or publishing inside information by accident are too high. Thus, I decided to find the cases from other companies.

Finding reliable information on which are the largest PC manufacturers in the world was not simple.

First, national listings of largest companies were rejected as it seemed that the listed companies held different market shares in different countries, and it is not possible to determine based on that information which of the companies are largest globally. Second, lists of business magazines that companies themselves often refer to were rejected because they do not provide detailed enough information on what specific sector of the ICT industry the listed companies represent. Among the top-ranking technology companies on the two most popular corporate listings – the list of The

World’s Biggest Public Companies (Forbes, n.d.) and the Global 500 list (Fortune, n.d.) – are companies that produce many kinds of devices and services. It was not possible to distinguish which of them are biggest in PC manufacturing specifically.

Eventually, Gartner’s list of World’s largest PC manufacturers by worldwide shipment estimates in 2016 (Table 1. Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 2016 (Thousands of Units) (Gartner, 2017).) was chosen as the source of information (Gartner, 2017). Gartner is a research institution that is highly valued in the ICT field, and thus this list is considered a reliable source of information. In addition, it provides information precisely on the topic of the study. The list presents the six largest PC manufacturers Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, Apple and Acer by their names, while just below a quarter of the worldwide PC business are marked to belong to “other” companies.

Table 1. Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 2016 (Thousands of Units) (Gartner, 2017).

According to Yin (2009), two or three replications of a case is sufficient when the theory related to the phenomenon is clear, excessive degree of certainty is not needed, and the aim is not to generate multiple different theoretical explanations. I also thought that in order to identify any single

abnormalities in the findings required studying more than one or two companies. On the other hand, based on initial reading of the listed companies’ materials, studying four or more companies on the

list does not seem to provide much additional variety in findings compared to studying just three.

Based on Yin’s suggestion and these initial remarks, the number of companies was decided to be three.

The three largest companies on Gartner’s list are Lenovo, HP and Dell. They represent a rough half of the worldwide PC business, which is considered sufficient for this study. Lenovo has offices in over 60 countries (Lenovo Group Limited, n.d.-a), HP in 64 countries (HP Inc., n.d.-a) and Dell in dozens of countries (Dell Inc., n.d.-a). Lenovo represented in that year 21% of the global shipments of PCs, HP 19% and Dell 15%. Other companies that produce PCs along with other devices and services may be larger in total size, but according to Gartner (2017) not in terms of PC

manufacturing.

Additional reasoning for including these companies in the study was searched for in different sustainability and responsibility listings. It is understood in this study that being on these lists means that the case company can be looked up to by other companies in the industry, and that the company represents the industry’s view of best corporate responsibility practices.

Two of the chosen case companies, Lenovo and HP, appears on a list of 2018 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World (Corporate Knights, 2018). Several listings that rank companies by the number of references to the SDGs in their corporate responsibility reports were also found, but as these lists do not assess the contents of the reported activities, they are not considered of interest for this study.

Based on initial information search from the companies, it was found that Lenovo and HP discuss the SDGs in their corporate responsibility agendas and report on Goal level activities in their 2016 corporate responsibility reports, while Dell only mentions the SDGs briefly and does not report on any specific Goal-related activities. I however decided to keep all three companies in this study so that information from the two SDG-oriented companies can be compared with Dell’s information.

Thus, Dell became a company against which the other two companies’ activities are reflected in order to gain understanding of the differences between activities in SDG-oriented and non-SDG-oriented PC manufacturers. In addition, I found that a relatively important part of HP’s business consisted of manufacturing and selling of printers. To maintain a focus on PC manufacturing and to keep the data consistent between the three companies, I excluded the information related

specifically to the printer business where possible. On top of its printer business, HP represents almost a fifth of the global trade of PCs and it is thus considered important for the study.

In short, choosing the three mentioned companies for this study is based on both theoretical and practical judgement. In order to gain sufficient understanding of how the SDGs are applied in the PC manufacturing business, it was necessary to choose more than two case companies. On the other hand, choosing four or more companies did not seem to add essential value to the research.