The Information System Seminar Series features, Richard Heeks, Professor of Digital Development at Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK
The connection between digital and inequality has traditionally been understood in terms of the digital divide or of forms of digital inequality whose core conceptualisation is exclusion. This presentation argues that, as the global South moves into a digital development paradigm of growing breadth and depth of digital engagement, an exclusion worldview is no longer sufficient. Drawing from ideas in the development studies literature on chronic poverty, the presentation argues the need for a new concept: “adverse digital incorporation”, meaning the process by which inclusion in a digital system enables a more-advantaged group to extract disproportionate value from the work or resources of another, less-advantaged group. This explains why inequality persists – even grows – in a digital development paradigm. To help ground future research and practice on this issue, the presentation inductively builds a conceptual model of adverse digital incorporation with three main component sets: the processes, the drivers and the causes of adverse digital incorporation. The presentation concludes with thoughts on a future research and practice agenda that seeks to deliver digital justice in the global South: a necessary reconfiguration of the broader components of power that currently shape the inclusionary connection between digital and inequality.
About
Richard Heeks is a Professor of Digital Development in the Global Development Institute, part of the School of Environment, Education and Development. He is Director of the Centre for Digital Development. He is one of the pre-eminent and highly-cited academics in the emerging sub-discipline of digital development/ICT4D, and has written six books, more than 60 refereed articles, and over 150 other papers and reports. His books include the Routledge text, "Information and Communication Technology for Development". Richard has been project leader on nine major international research contracts, with grants totalling more than £1,800,000 and coordinating the work of partner organisations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These include the the ESRC-funded project, "Fairwork in the Platform Economy in the Global South", and the ESRC-funded "Development Implications of Digital Economies" research network. He is responsible for the creation of five new postgraduate programmes, including the world's first Masters in ICTs for Development and the distance learning MSc in Management & Information Systems.
