Doctoral Dissertation: Negotiating Progress: The Construction of Systems of Value Around Digital Divide Interventions

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research project explores the ways in which systems of value are constructed within and around technology-based international development "digital divide" projects, where discourses and traditions of technology innovation, nonprofit fundraising, commercial technology, and international development intersect. A central hypothesis is that IT-oriented nonprofits will face a significant challenge as they reconcile these intersections, such as that between nonprofit principles (based on altruism and a concern about the conditions of disparity) and technoromantic ones (based on inevitable progress, often facilitated by commercial capital). The ways in which these contradictions are worked out within individual organizations will reflect the ways in which participants selectively identify with nonprofit, business, and technology traditions as well as the specific generational and historical experiences of the participants. Are these new systems of value fundamentally different from those of earlier nonprofit projects, and if so, can they be understood as expressing an "elective affinity" between new formations of capital and technoromantic ideals? (Gerth and Mills 1946, Weber 1958) What is it about certain values that encourages actors to perceive them as worthy of adoption? The researcher will examine the ways in which individuals within these groups understand their work and participation in relation to broader projects of development, technology innovation, and global information infrastructures. Three nonprofit groups in Massachusetts have been selected for a multi-sited study; each represents a particular attitude towards the intersection of the fields of development and technology. Geekcorps, which sends techie volunteers to assignments in Ghana, is a nonprofit run in the spirit of a commercial startup. KITE accepts computer donations and then reconfigures them with open source software and redistributes them to nonprofits in Africa, bridging the international nonprofit community and the Open Source movement. ThinkCycle is a voluntary association of students at MIT working with nonprofits overseas to design aninformation architecture that allows engineers to work collaboratively with NGOs in the design of development solutions; engineers turned nonprofit development workers. In order to access both self-conscious and transparent systems of value and meaning, research methods will include participant observation, interviews, and textual and social network analyses. This study will bring theories of social dramas and liminality to bear on the emergent aspect of these organizations, and to the contestation of meanings that takes place in the negotiation of values and categories. The researcher will apply exchange theory to the analysis of the complex, layered web of giving and receiving that takes place around nonprofit and development work, and theories of value to make sense of the ways in which participants understand the value of technology and of nonprofit work as means to further certain ideologies, and as ends in themselves.