Partnership Global IT Business

Objectives

This chapter aims to help you understand the following:

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  The core characteristics of a partnership social system that most closely relate to the global IT business as a social institution.

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  How global IT businesses in the U.S. need to shift from dominator to partnership perspectives.

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  Why we need a new global economic model, such as Riane Eisler’s (2007) “partnerism.”

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  How developed nations can work in partnership with developing nations regarding the global IT business in a way that does not reify our historical dominator colonial relations.

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  How to begin to envision partnership policy making in the global IT business.

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  How one individual can contribute to co-creating partnership in the global IT business as a social institution.

Introduction

In Chapter VII, I asked how our knowledge about the dramatically unequal distribution of global income combined with the estimates on global population growth might raise questions about our social responsibility to each other as a human community with regard to the direction of development efforts in the IT industry. How might we use technology to close the existing (and rapidly growing) gap between the haves and have-nots worldwide? How might we use IT in service of human need instead of placing humans in service of the technology? What are the most critical global social concerns that technology might serve? Can we afford the either/or attitude of IT businesses that completely divorce profit-making IT development from broader social concerns? What might a partnership philosophy of science look like? What might a partnership global IT business look like? This chapter outlines a few starting points for answering these questions by exploring the following topics in relation to co-creating a partnership global IT business: (1) U.S. economic dominance in IT; (2) “partnerism” a new economic model; (3) global IT development ideas between developed and developing nations; (4) partnership IT policy making; (5) examples of partnership science and IT; and (6) ideas for where you can begin to co-create partnership.

In Chapter I, I contrasted the characteristics of dominator and partnership social systems. Table 1 describes the characteristics of partnership social systems that are particularly relevant to the global IT business as a social institution as they relate to the topics covered in this chapter (Eisler, 1987, 2002, 2007; Eisler & Loye, 1990; Eisler & Miller, 2004).