A Transformation in the Global South: Innovation and Organizations in Kenya

• In Event: Innovation Outside Markets: Government and/in Technoscientific Innovation

Abstract

Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah, the technology sector driven by Kenya’s mobile revolution, is a key site where the digital future of developing economies is presently being negotiated. Nairobi, one of the largest tech hubs in Africa and one of the world’s most unequal cities, has, in the past decade, become an experimental ground for technology-driven social enterprises, ‘emerging markets’ initiatives, and government projects meant to ‘uplift’ the underclass. Finance married to technology in products such as mobile money, digital credit, and mobile banking has taken on particular salience. While data does not exist at the city level, Kenya has undergone one of the fastest technology adoptions in history with less than 1% of the population using mobile phones in 2000 to close to 90% today. How this socio-technical transformation is unfolding and what effects it may have on civil society in developing countries are far from clear. A dominant perspective in the literature argues that “the mobile revolution” facilitates and extends network forms of social interaction. From media studies, access to mobile phones (and information and communications technologies more broadly) allows individuals to “see beyond their world” (Burrell 2008) and extends the horizons for flows of information, ideas, technologies, products, and peoples. The field of economics associates the adoption of mobile phones (and mobile money) with a commercial revolution—the birth of a financial economy— as information gaps are filled, transaction costs reduced, risk is spread, and savings are more securely stored in digital currency (Suri, Jack, and Stoker 2012). Both perspectives direct their analytic gaze on individual-to-individual interactions and suggest how, in the aggregate, the increased range and density of such interactions have transformative consequences. Contrary to the reigning perspective, I hypothesize that “the mobile revolution” not only facilitates interpersonal exchange but, more consequentially, helps usher in a society of organizations (Perrow 1991). I take the case of the expansion of mobile infrastructure, supported by state and industrial actors, to 1) descriptively examine its relationship with the expanding the reach of formal organizations and 2) examine how the extension of bureaucratic forms is not a function of their efficiency (as Weber argues with his metaphor of the iron cage) but a consequence of cultural alignment and 3) of territorial alignment.

Author

• Parijat Chakrabarti, Princeton University