Welcome to the dark side of web development: managing tensions between business strategy and business ethics.

As digital technologies become more pervasive in our daily lives, both hopes and worries arise regarding their design, development, and implementation. The contrast between design choices that originate from business strategy or from ethics becomes more and more visible. While both business strategy and business ethics in the digital world are increasingly researched, the relationship between them has stayed largely unknown. To explore this further, this thesis focuses on the research question: “How do Dutch web developers manage tensions between business strategy and business ethics?”. For the context of this study web developers are defined as individuals who are involved with the designing or building of websites or web applications. The designers can be divided into three groups: User Experience (UX) designers, Interaction (IxD) designers and User Interface (UI) designers. Although these are three different specialisations, there is a lot that overlaps. The category of builders, on the other hand, consists of people who code, construct, analyse and manage websites or web applications. They are often divided into three categories as well: front-end developers, back-end developers and full-stack developers A qualitative approach was used in this research, as this research used language to try to comprehend concepts based on the experiences of a population. A total of 11 in-depth interviews with web developers in the Netherlands were conducted. Studying this data, three themes emerged: decisions based on feelings, unfamiliarity and design choices. First, decisions based on feelings illustrates how participants use their personal feelings in decision-making when it comes to ethics, privacy and strategy. The second theme, unfamiliarity, shows the unawareness of the interviewees about guidelines, their company’s strategy and ethics in web development. The last theme of design choices touches upon user-centred design, unethical design and contradicting design choices. All in all, the results of this research show that ethics play a large role in the daily of web developers and that there is a strong relationship between ethics and business strategy.