1In the late 2010s, the issue of the social and environmental impacts of digital technologies emerged in public debate in France, thanks to a range of institutional, non-profit and academic actors. The debate was crystallised through several terms (Krieg-Planque, 2009), such as “digital sobriety” (Flipo, 2020; Shift Project, 2018), “sustainable IT” (Berthoud et al., 2007) and “responsible digital technology.” The latter term was widely used in the world of organisations, notably because it had been adopted in institutional reference documents such the Référentiel général d’écoconception de services numériques [General Guidelines for Eco-design of Digital Services] issued by the Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM, 2024). The term designated both the negative social and environmental impacts of digital technologies and the means to attenuate these, a set of concerns that were often grouped together under the label “Green IT.” In a complementary manner, “responsible digital technology” also referred to the idea that digital technologies could contribute to socio-ecological transitions, in a logic that some qualified as “IT for Green.”
- 1 We will use the expression “responsible digital technology” with quotation marks to speak about the (...)
2The spread of the formula “responsible digital technology” was a sign that a public policy problem had emerged (Neveu, 2015), and this problem articulated digital and environmental concerns within the professional universe. However, despite the ambitions for transformation manifest in the new discourse, actual organisational change is not very perceptible on the ground. This leads us to the following question: could the ideological framing of “responsible digital technology,” a framing which does not challenge production models, explain why transformation in the sector takes the form of diffuse professional adjustment rather than structural change? This article thus interrogates the links between a formula that attests to a desire for transformation and the organisational transformation that is effectively manifested in a range of practices that those interviewed for the study linked to the expression “responsible digital technology.”1
3The analysis draws on results from an empirical study conducted between September 2023 and December 2024 under a project funded by the Community of the Paris Ouest La Défense (POLD) Agglomeration.2 The study was aimed at identifying the skills and professions linked to responsible digital technology. It was based on a double corpus: a documentary review of job openings and trainings that mentioned the term “responsible digital technology;” and a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with fifteen human resource managers and digital responsibility officers (in private and public organisations, corporations and SMEs), and ten teacher-researchers involved in designing training on digital responsibility.
- 3 By “organisation” we refer to a structured group of actors coordinating their action in order to ac (...)
4The article is structured in three parts. We first present the sociotechnical context, analysing how the formula “responsible digital technology” spread, the strategic ambitions it carried within organisations,3 and its embodiment in a range of practices that belong to the “politics of small gestures.” We then present our methodology and the results of the study. Given that the organisations observed in the study were of different size and status, and working in different sectors, the need to standardise practices explains the ideological framing of responsible digital technology. We then move our analysis to the scale of professions, interrogating the way in which certain professionals contributed to structuring crosscutting practices, independently of their organisation of origin. This perspective allows us to identify regular patterns and general trends that escape a strictly organisational reading.
- 4 Le Guide de la communication responsable [Guide for Responsible Communication] (2022); Les bonnes p (...)
5In 2009, an association dedicated to Green IT (the Green IT Club) was born. In 2018, some of the club’s members founded the Institut du Numérique Responsable [Institute for Responsible Digital Technology], a think-tank which went on to develop “responsible digital technology” certification and labelling. In 2012, GDS Ecoinfo, a research group working on the links between IT and the environment, was founded. In 2018, a report by the think tank Shift Project, titled Towards Digital Sobriety, was published. At the same time, ADEME, the French agency spearheading the ecological transition, produced several guides and reports on the topic.4 At the governmental level, the creation of the Interministerial Digital Directorate (2019) and the enactment of AGEC (2020) and REEN (2021) regulations, which addressed notably the issue of digital waste reduction, marked the integration of digital responsibility in the policy agenda. On the professional level, a guide of knowledge for eco-responsible digital technology, Référentiel de connaissances pour un numérique éco-responsable (Boulet et al., 2020) was published, with the aim of guiding the development of IT and tech training.
6These events helped transform the issue of responsible digital technology into a public policy problem, that is, “a social fact of any type [transformed] into an issue of public debate and/or state intervention” (Neveu, 1999) and, in our case, more specifically integrated into the agenda of organisations. In such a context, responsible digital technology was commonly defined as a set of practices aimed at reducing the environmental and social impacts of digital technologies throughout their life-cycle, from design to end-use, while also fostering the capacity of these technologies to support the ecological transition (ADEME, 2023; INR, 2022). This definition was based on two shared observations: first, that digital technologies had become omnipresent in economic and social activity and were raising major concerns; second, that these technologies accounted for an ever-growing share of global greenhouse gas emissions, and their production consumed a high amount of non-renewal resources.
7In response to these observations, some organisations developed a discourse linked to “responsible digital technology” as part of their CSR policies, articulating the “Green IT” and “IT for Green” components. In actuality, however, the effective appropriation of the issue by organisations resulted mainly in dispersed initiatives: awareness-raising workshops, carbon footprint calculators, eco-design processes, and internal charters. This heterogeneity fragmented the responsibility for spearheading digital responsibility across departments, thus limiting its recognition as a strategic crosscutting issue. Often, predominance was given to technical issues, such as harmonising individual practices or measuring associated data. The example of carbon footprint calculation is an illustration of this tendency. At the telecommunications company Orange, the carbon footprint was presented as a tool integral to any CSR strategy and was embodied through the establishment of individual dashboards as part of a “policy of small gestures:”
- 5 Interviews have been anonymised. Only the name of the organisation is mentioned.
I have a dashboard on my carbon footprint, every month. I can click on it and see how many pages I have printed, how many emails I forwarded, how many I sent, how many I read... (Orange5)
8In short, digital responsibility is identified as a public policy problem by organisations, but action towards it often remains restricted to technical measures and awareness raising, actions whose impact is difficult to objectify. In such a context, assessing the real outcomes of the spread of the formula on organisational practices, and in particular, on the actors that implement these practices becomes a complex matter.
9Our analysis first focuses on the organisational outcomes of the formula “responsible digital technologies.” The data that was collected revealed a diverse range of practices. Large companies have sufficient resources at their disposal to subscribe to ambitious approaches: certification, labels, specific training mechanisms, etc. Their dominant position in the subcontracting chain of command allows them to gradually impose standards on smaller businesses (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2017). This dynamic creates an organisational asymmetry: the requirements of large companies become the market standards.
10Small and medium sized businesses for their part have difficulty following the same logic due to their limited human and financial resources. Some businesses undertake occasional measures, others patch together framework documents in order to respond to tenders, without having a real structured strategy. The testimony of a study informant from the company Sentiles (a medium-sized business specialised in service provision and project management) illustrates well this tension:
Today, any firm worth its salt, stipulates in its requirements that you must be CSR, have a charter [...]. But I realised that the requirements of Engie were very much oriented towards large firms. Large firms that work with Engie must have a clean sheet, for everything, with labels.
11This dynamic favours the circulation of standardising boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989): labels, dashboards, guidelines, indicators. These instruments play a translation role between actors with heterogenous interests and expertise (Callon, 1986). The standardisation that is thus put in place induces a structural limitation which explains the absence of significant change within the organisations: digital responsibility does not call into question the modes of production. Neither the modes of interaction between businesses, nor degrowth, nor low-tech logics are ever brought up. As several study informants put it, it is about producing “better with less,” but always continuing to follow the standard functioning of the market. Beyond the strategic discourses, the tools which enable the implementation of such discourse attest to the fact that the public policy problem remains integrated within liberal and commercial logics. The climate-centrist framing that is particular to responsible digital technologies can explain this limitation. First, the focus on quantified measurement concentrates discourse on the issue of CO2 emissions and locks organisations into logics of technical optimisation, to the detriment of more holistic reflection on the uses and end goals of digital technologies. Then, carbon footprint reduction marginalises the social dimensions. While concern for issues such inclusion does sometimes transpire, such issues remain secondary. These organisational observations invite an interrogation of the true import of responsible digital technologies as a vector of transformation. While the formula does structure some internal adjustment, it appears to work more as a language of compliance rather than a lever for innovation. Professionalisation of the sector thus appears partial, dependent on local configurations, individual profiles or institutional opportunities.
12To better understand these dynamics, our analysis now delves into the level of professions, so as to examine how they participate (or don’t) in instituting crosscutting practices. Analysis of the data collected revealed that positions with “digital responsibility” explicitly in their title were rare. That however does not mean an absence of change. In the advertised job openings analysed, the skills that were sought out for main part were related to project management, coordination or the capacity to integrate environmental issues into existing projects. Responsible digital technology thus did not give rise to a specific profession, but reoriented practices, redeployed know-how and encouraged hybridisation of expertise. This dynamic fits with an organisation mode of functioning that pre-existed: that of working in project mode, inherited from classic computer logic.
13Two large categories of professions were discerned: technical professions and consulting professions The former concerns digital tech professionals who saw their duties transformed so as to respond to the environmental crisis: procurement officers, legal officers, information system managers, IT project managers, and engineers. The formula “responsible digital technology” here serves to qualify relatively specific and material changes in professions that already existed. Procurement officers shifted towards more virtuous practices (renting, reconditioning, recycling), while developers adapted their way of coding to produce more sober websites. For these professions, the question was not one of creating new and specialised trainings, but rather of integrating awareness on environmental issues in pre-existing technical curricula.
Overall, we don’t need new degrees or new courses, we need the courses to be full and that young people have a good basic grounding in these topics [CSR, ecological transition]. We have good courses, we have good degrees in France. There is no point tearing everything down to come up with something else. (Saint-Gobain)
14The latter category covers the professions of consulting, management and change-management. These professionals play an interface role, accompanying the implementation of digital responsibility strategies, by educating team members and facilitating acceptance of change. While technical expertise is not a prerequisite for these professions, a basic minimum level of technical knowledge is necessary for effective dialogue with the technical players.
15In these consulting professions, the formula “responsible digital technology” evokes a new universe of practices, often difficult to define in a precise manner. Study informants insist on the decisive role of “leaders,” people capable of championing these issues within organisations:
I think the merit goes to my manager. They are someone very passionate about these issues. (Société Générale)
16These cause entrepreneurs (Neveu, 2017) transform regulatory constraints into concrete action, creating impetus for the creation of new positions, programmes or the revision of job descriptions. Such initiatives occur within contrasting organisational configurations. While some consulting professionals access positions with responsibilities related to strategy, others highlight the precarious and “improvised” nature of their functions.
Today, people do this in addition to something else, there is no dedicated position for this. (Ingérop)
17To sum up, technical professions linked to digital technologies have evolved in a relatively fluid way, by gradually integrating specific expertise to adapt their practices, but the dynamic is less clearcut for consulting professions. These professions which are supposed to bring a strategic and crosscutting vision to digital responsibility, are constrained by a lack of structure: the absence of dedicated training and clear guidelines leads to forms of organisational improvisation, where initiatives depend more on individuals than on stable professional frameworks.
18This article aimed to interrogate the transformative power of the formula “responsible digital technology,” by analysing the sociopolitical context that enabled its emergence, the transformations that the formula legitimises and the ideological framework that it institutes, both at the scale of organisations and professions. The analysis of the circulation of the formula between these two levels revealed diffuse change, marked by the reorientation of existing professional practices. From the organisational viewpoint, discourse on responsible digital technology appears often us legitimising rhetoric, carried forward through technical instruments, without calling into question the logics of production. The degrowth or low-tech perspectives are for the most part absent from organisational strategies.
19By contrast, the analysis of the level of professions revealed that some evolution is in course in terms of practices and existing roles, even if such changes rely still on individual dynamics and often take an improvised form. The paucity of positions explicitly dedicated to responsible digital technology attests to this reality: what we observe is not structured professionalisation, but rather a gradual transformation of professions. This transformation is based on the emergence of responsibility as a crosscutting principle to take into consideration the impact of digital technology on society without challenging modes of production, of communication or of organisation of work at whose services these technologies are placed.