The Information Society
In poor countries information and communication technologies (ICTs) are expected
to play a key developmental role. Many see in these technologies potential for
turning around uncompetitive industries and dysfunctional public administration,
and for providing unprecedented opportunities for the information-intensive
social services, such as health and education. Nevertheless, it is well known
that such developmental benefits have been difficult to
achieve for a variety of complex reasons. There are two interrelated problems
here. First, many organizations have difficulties in nurturing and cultivating
complex technology projects over the long periods of time that are typically
required. Second, the resulting ICT-based systems may have little impact on
the organizational weakness they were intended to alleviate.
A series of theoretical explanations have been proposed to these problems,
often accompanied by policy programs and professional 'good practice'. Difficulties
to achieve successful technology innovation were first associated with the broader
literature on 'technology transfer' which attempted to emphasize the gap between
the assumptions inscribed in the technologies developed in the context of industrialized
countries, and the prevailing way and state of
organizational life in the countries to which the technologies were being transferred.
The academic discourse of the 1990's reinforced the argument on the significance
of the association of information systems development with organizational change.
While this argument on its own was not new, what was different was that IT innovation
came to be systematically associated with organizational development. Donor
agencies and international management consultancy started routinely linking
computerization programs with organizational reform, such as BPR.
The prevailing attitude to follow 'best international practice' and the association
of IT projects with organizational redesign adds new complexities to the technology
transfer problem. Several authors have argued that information systems solutions
from the 'developed' world, conveyed by professional norms, standardization
'imperatives', or the emulation of patterns seen elsewhere as successful, cannot
be replicated in the developing world with the expectation that
similar results would also accrue. Local adaptations are necessary. The key
motivation of this special issue is to examine “how can such adaptations
be achieved in practice?” amidst the associated tensions between global
solutions, technologies, and practices on one hand, and local requirements and
institutional dynamics on the other.
This special issue is born from the International Federation of Information
Processing Working Group 9.4 Meeting in Cape Town in May 2000. This working
group on “socio-economic impacts of computers in developing countries”
had its sixth meeting in Cape Town after earlier meetings in New Delhi, Nairobi,
Havana, Cairo and Bangkok. The conference theme was “Information Flows,
Work Practices and Local Improvisations” and reflected an attempt to shift
from the earlier focus 9.4 meetings had on “why are technology initiatives
often failing in developing country contexts?” to “what can we do
about it?” The focus was on improvisations, and how they can be fostered
to enable information flows to be meaningfully and effectively integrated into
everyday work practices of different kinds of organizations including public,
private, non-governmental and international. This shift in focus was also reflective
of a larger trend in the field that acknowledged that no longer was it productive
to debate “are computers good or bad for developing countries?” but
instead the need was to address the question of “how can the potential
of ICTs be harnessed to address locally relevant problems?”
Another motivation for this special issue comes from the need to try and situate the domain of studies on ICTs and developing countries in the “mainstream” of information systems research. It is indeed a sad reflection of the state of research from the perspective of both the developing countries and the “mainstream” that is primarily North America, that both these domains have co-existed for many years apparently oblivious of each other. To make this point, if one picks up back issues for the last 5 years of journals like MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Organization Science, Information Society, Journal of MIS etc, in all probability not even 5 articles could be got that deal explicitly with developing countries issues. This is indeed a shame when you consider that much more than half the world is living in so-called developing countries, and the potential and need for technology to solve pressing important problems like environment, health, education, infrastructure, is significant. The reason for this exclusion is of course not one-way. Most researchers working within the 9.4 field also tend to function as an isolated community doing pockets of research and writing for and presenting their research to each other in the safe haven of their Group meetings. In not directly engaging with the research published in the North American and European Journals, 9.4 researchers miss out on interesting ideas, and the opportunity to influence the “mainstream” with what they believe is meaningful.
The motivation for this special issue then is to attempt and span across these
two rather isolated communities of research and see how they can support and
benefit from each other. A special issue in an important journal like The Information
Society Journal that has North American origins and a broad mandate of examining
“is technology helping to create a better society in which we live?”
can help to provide a platform for future debates and mutual learning. So, both
from the perspective of potential readership and the theme content, we believe
the match between the selected articles of and the journal is strong. Another
similar proposal to try and bridge these communities is through a joint conference
of the 8.2 and 9.4 IFIP groups in Athens in 2003.
There are numerous reasons to support such integration as developing country contexts have a lot to offer and also require the engagement of the broader research community. The problem domains are rich and meaningful due to the diversity in contexts, situations, work cultures, and interest groups. For example, applying a geographic information system in India is not a straight case of an organizational implementation, but needs to take into consideration multiple agencies including international funding bodies like the World Bank, the influence of global agreements like the Rio Summit, and complex systems of bureaucracy that overlap with other political systems. The individual manager is not someone who can be studied in isolation in the work situation, since social structures relating to home, family, community, are often more inter-connected and overlap with the work domain than is the case in many developed contexts. While making such generalizations is always problematic, the basic point being emphasized is that the diversity, complexity and significance of the problem domain has the ingredients for interesting research questions, and the potential to challenge and stretch the boundaries of social theories used in information systems research including Structuration Theory, Actor-Network, and Network Society, and Contingency Theory. Engaging with these theories to understand problems in contexts that are very different from where the theories have been formulated, is useful to identify the limits to the concepts and how they can be expanded.
With the above objectives of elaborating the complexity of research problems
and the variety of theoretical and empirical approaches used for its study,
we initially “selected” eight papers from the Cape Town conference,
and agreed with the authors that we, the guest editors, would work with them
individually in a collaborative mode to take the papers towards publication.
Unfortunately, we had attrition along the way, and this experience demonstrates
the problems
researchers working in institutions in developing countries have with respect
to accessing literature and a community of researchers, while dealing with the
problem of getting the time to write whilst balancing different demands from
the home, work and social fronts. Another major issue concerns language, and
researchers not writing in English tend to be excluded from these broader “mainstream”
networks of global research. Despite how hard we tried we could not
take to this completion stage two interesting papers from Brazil and Thailand.
And a third author writing about Nigeria dropped out along the way for various
personal and professional reasons. We were then left with five papers, and added
a sixth paper by inviting Richard Heeks who has been extremely active and influential
in the 9.4 community, but had not attended the Cape Town meeting. It is not
a coincidence that none of the six papers that finally appear in this
issue come from authors independently based in institutions in developing countries.
After a long and arduous process, which has spread over nearly three years since
we sent out the call for papers for the Cape Town meeting, we have the pleasure
to present the following six papers in the order in which they appear in the
special issue:
We now present an extended introduction of these papers.
Lucy Suchman's paper, which is an adaptation of her keynote speech at the
conference, sets some conceptual landmarks for the study of questions regarding
relationships of global and local in IS practice. Unusually and paradoxically
for the focus of the research stream intended to highlight issues relevant to
developing countries, this paper is anchored in the author's experience in an
advanced research environment in the USA. By accounting for such a case,
Suchman demystifies the superiority assumed by global a-contextual knowledge,
which is, nevertheless, based on the 'illusion that everything works smoothly
somewhere else'. Also, she identifies the common need across locations for IS
practice to focus on relations between ICT production and use actors.
Jørn Braa and Calle Hedberg abstract some lessons from a longitudinal
project ongoing since 1994 starting with the dismantling of apartheid in South
Africa. Amidst a context of fragmentation, non-existent infrastructure, and
a health system focused on curative rather than preventive care, Jørn
and Calle, who are also key actors in the project, describe a process that seeks
to inscribe assumptions of bottom up and local control through the systems they
design and implement. A key theoretical point concerns the role of standards
and the process by which they are developed in complex settings. Standardization,
the process by which an array of heterogeneous actors can be aligned, is far
from given, and determined by the negotiations between actors and the alliances
formed. Imposing universal standards in a constantly changing context is impossibility,
and there are always going to be local universalities playing out in
hierarchy of standards. By elaborating on the role of standards through concepts
of the ”hierarchy of standards” and ”multiple universalities,”
Braa and Hedberg contribute to research in Science and Technology Studies, technology
transfer and systems development. The methodological implication is in its emphasis
on the long-term nature of systems development projects, especially in developing
country contexts. Their work ongoing since 1994 has important lessons for international
agencies who plan technology projects in a “lift and drop” mode over
short time periods of sometimes even one or two years.
Abiodum Bada demonstrates the global/local tensions with a case study of an
effort to apply the business process reengineering (BPR) practice that captured
the imagination of management professionals worldwide during the 1990s in a
Nigerian bank. Bada draws critically from the institutionalist theory of organizations
to form conceptual lenses for his case study. The hypothesis he forms and supports
with his case analysis is that the spread of techniques such
as BPR in international management and IS practice does not imply worldwide
homogenisation of organizational practice. The study of the experience of the
Nigerian bank shows that the organization benefited from the implementation
of a universal management intervention technique by adapting it to the local
values and ways of doing things. Even though several aspects of local organizing
action were dysfunctional from the a-contextually rational perspective conveyed
by the global management technique, they were meaningful in the local context
and had to be retained in the 're-engineering' of locally effective organizational
practice.
Leiser Silva's paper is situated in the Ministry of Health in Guatemala, specifically
the analysis of how the process of outsourcing of information systems for hospitals
can be understood as an improvisation. Improvisations are unexpected institutionally
rooted actions that evolve in response to situational exigencies. Leiser extends
earlier work in this area through his insight that in developing country contexts,
often improvisations are inspired by political factors, and that
people in power can shape the trajectory of improvisations in particular ways.
Theoretically, the contribution of the paper is in analyzing the inter-relationship
between improvisation and power. Power need not always be negative, but can
often enable positive outcomes. Developing country environments tend to be politically
volatile and unstable, as a result of which decisions around IT projects are
often driven by reasons of expediency rather than rationality
considerations. Political power, which often overrides the bureaucracy in many
situations, cannot be wished away with because it is integral to the context,
and may not be “evil” as is often perceived. The challenge thus is
to examine how can this power be harnessed effectively to support IT projects,
especially through the concept of improvisation. The theoretical basis of the
paper comes from John Law and Stuart Clegg, which have interesting and yet largely
untapped implications for the study of power in IS research.
The paper provides implications for the practice of outsourcing, different
in context from the typical North American organization typically described
in existing research, and set in a public sector setting of a developing country.
The paper illustrates the concept of “selective outsourcing” where
by the requirements analysis of the system is done in-house by teams from within
the hospital. The requirement that these teams identify provides the basis for
the
tender document to outsource the development to the external contractor. Through
this approach, developed largely through a series of improvisations, the requirements
developed are more sensitive to user needs, and there is a greater sense of
commitment to the final system because of the participation of users in the
analysis process.
In Richard Heeks' paper the global/local tension is addressed in an analysis
of the high rate failure of IS projects in developing countries. Heeks discusses
the meaning of IS innovation 'failure' and examines existing indications on
widespread IS project failure in developing countries. Based on the position
that a high proportion of information systems in developing countries 'can be
categorized as failing either totally or partially', the paper proceeds to examine
the causes of such failures and proposes a model that identifies the match,
or mismatch, between IS practitioners' designs and local user 'actuality'. While
the paper draws
from currently debated theories on failure, design, and organizational change,
Heeks is clearly interested in ways of aiding the practitioner understand the
causes of failure. Thus, his main effort in this paper is to translate theoretical
ideas into a model that provides a link between theory and the world of practice.
Knut Rolland and Eric Monteiro's paper while not being set directly in a developing
country context, formulates important theoretical and managerial implications
of a universal and conceptual universal. While significant current literature
refers to the “tensions of the global and local” as an important dynamic
of globalization, fewer authors elaborate on the nature of these tensions and
more importantly “what can we do about it?” These questions are addressed
in
an ongoing longitudinal investigation of the implementation of information infrastructure
in a large global maritime shipping organization with offices in more than 100
countries including many developing countries. The use of the terminology of
information infrastructures is to primarily emphasize the large, complex and
interconnected nature of contemporary systems today. Such a perspective should
help to understand the interconnected nature of technology that while
being situated in local contexts of use spans out simultaneously across numerous
global contexts. It is emphasized that the development and use of information
infrastructures is much greater than just a technical endeavor, especially in
systems that span multiple social, economical, institutional, political and
strategic contexts. Technical perspective emphasizes universal solutions under
the assumption that through the use of appropriate standards and protocols,
the interplay between the local and global domains can be rationalized. While
technical solutions are no doubt sufficient conditions to trying to find this
balance, they are by
no means sufficient.
An opposing view to universal solutions is the “situated approach”
where the local is celebrated, and sometimes rather dogmatically emphasizes
the need to design independent and local situations. However, for various reasons,
especially cost considerations as Knut and Eric point out, such a perspective
is infeasible to work out in practice involving multiple inter-connected sites.
The challenge then is how to try and find a “pragmatic balance” that
shows sensitivity
to local contexts, and can yet draw upon the benefits of “economies of
scale” and learning that universal approaches provide. Trying to address
this challenge has important implications for the “transfer of technology”
literature that tends to dichotomize developed and developing countries and
treats ICTs as a black box that is taken from one context and “dropped
into” another.