ICTs for whose development? A critical analysis of the discourses surrounding an ICT for Development Initiative for a group of microenterprise entrepreneurs operating in the Jamaican tourism industry: Towards the development of methodologies and analytical tools for understanding and explaining the ICT for Development Phenomenon

摘要

This is an interdiscliplinary qualitative study which uses an exploratory research design and builds on Fariclough's Critical Discourse Analysis methodology to analyze the discourses surrounding an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for livelihood development project in Jamaica, introduced by the United Nations Development Programme - the Jamaica Sustainable Development Networking Programme (JSDNP). The primary objective of this project is to provide the poor in Jamaican communities with access to, and training in ICTs. In this research, I specifically focus on the discourses surrounding the JSDNP Cybercentre Project for a group of microenterprise entrepreneurs in the Jamaican tourism industry to access the epistemological assumptions of this project. From the data collected it was found that at one level, the JSDNP Cybercentre Project encouraged specific ways of acting and organizing congruent with the configurations, processes and structures of corporate firms of industrialized countries, by representing the achievement of livelihood expansion through the use of specific ICTs in a particular way which excluded other discourses. The particular ways of acting and organizing promoted by the Cybercentre encouraged the use of non-indigenous technologies, undervalued indigenous technologies and excluded the indigenization of non-indigenous technologies. These discourses were incompatible with the operational and structural configurations of trans-temporal poor entrepretrepreneurs interviewed and were more favourable to the non-poor and spatio-temporal ones. One of the wider implications of the discourse therefore was that they play a fundamental role in perpetuating entrenched inequalities through the preservation of social practices, along with their associated systems and structures. It was also found that these modalities limited the operational processes of all microenterprise entrepreneurs who were exposed to the Cybercentre Project. These entrepreneurs have limited control over the configuration of non-indigenous technologies; their technological and creative capabilities are restricted; their ability to indigenize non-indigenous technologies impaired; and they are highly dependent on non-indigenous technologies (which themselves have a number of limitations).