For Professor Lange, business and ethics are not separable

When Professor Lange is not in Passau, he researches and teaches at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, where he is the Lincoln Professor of Management Ethics. "A longstanding interest of mine is in challenging the notion that business and ethics are two separate things," he says. For example, he addresses how moral considerations are implicated in even the most instrumental and economic concerns of business.

Global companies and their cultural interactions

The field of digital platforms offers numerous avenues and opportunities for research exploration: "It is important to study these ecosystems because they have such tremendous impact. They help shape public opinion, they affect our behaviour, they have an impact on how resources and opportunities are allocated in our society," says the researcher. Digital platforms operate globally, but in different cultural contexts. It is therefore important to analyse how they react to these different environments. Lange also finds it interesting that digital platforms themselves have an impact on how public values are changing and evolving.

Along these lines, Professor Lange has observed that US public values seem to be growing more sensitive to European-influenced concerns about individual customer privacy, while European public values might be gradually embracing an American-influenced enthusiasm for data-driven innovation.

In Passau, the management ethicist takes part in the regular meetings of the Research Training Group’s interdisciplinary doctoral students. He gives them advice on their research work. He also holds workshops himself, for example on the interplay between public values and digital platforms. In turn, he benefits in his research work from the exchange with young researchers from different cultural contexts: "They enable me to better understand how digital platform companies adapt to the cultural nuances in different countries."

The doctoral students at the DFG Research Training Group 2720 "Digital Platform Ecosystems" come from various disciplines, such as business informatics, business administration, economics and communication studies. They also have different cultural backgrounds, for example from Germany, Egypt and Kenya. However, they are focusing their research on one topic: the effects of digital platform ecosystems.