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Introduction: exploring a digital divide with ethical implications
In this article, we discuss some ethical issues in the internet encounter between customer and bank. Explorative empirical data related to the difficulties that customers have when they deal with the bank through internet technology and electronic banking. We discuss the difficulties that customers expressed from an ethical standpoint. We show how their ethical reactions of feelings of distance or closeness are central to their experience of the bank internet encounter. We describe ethical theory relevant to the customer relation in the bank context and we use the critical incident technique ([8] Flanagan, 1954) to capture examples of bank internet encounters from the perspective of customers. We use ethical theory to analyse the dilemmas of the bank internet encounter that emerge out of the empirical findings. The focus of analysis is the emergence of meaning and intentionality structures from customers and the concept of customer competence that is implied in the analysis of the ethical dilemmas of the bank encounter.
The key problem of the paper is "how can we illustrate the user's (in) competence in a web-based commercial environment from an ethical standpoint?" We illustrate this ethical dilemma with data from a Danish retail bank. The data have been structured by an advanced text analytic method, Pertex (by generation of intentionality of verbal actors from text). This empirical evidence can be illustrated as an exemplar of how feelings and lack of competence need to be addressed by research. The data illustrate the problems and difficulties that customers encounter when being in contact with the internet bank.
We structure this explorative paper as follows: first we elaborate on the concept of competence as understood by the critical incident technique (CIT) approach. Second we briefly review findings on internet technology adoption with relevance to our research: retail banking. Third, we introduce some ethical theory to be used in the subsequent analysis. Fourth we expand on our method of data collection and text analysis. Fifth we present the explorative results and sixth their ethical implications. We round off with a short concluding section outlining the limitations of the study.
Competence as a must-know concept
The basic premise of this paper is that [8] Flanagan (1954, pp. 327-58) already has...