Making sense of Africa's emerging digital transformation and its many futures
File(s)
Author(s)
Ndemo, Bitange
Weiss, Tim
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Digital technologies have spread across the African continent at an inexorable pace. Widely cited data on adoption rates suggest that digital technologies are making their way into every facet of life in African societies — a broader change process cast in this paper as digital transformation seems to be underway. We look beyond adoption rates and examine actions that bring about favorable economic, organizational, political, social, and cultural environments which digital technologies depend on to realize their transformative potentiality. In our view, pure adoption does not indicate any broader change or transformation but rather indicates a potentiality for change — a latent power to catalyze broader societal change processes. In this paper, we develop a framework to make sense of Africa's emerging digital transformation. In so doing, we elaborate on the multiple environments that digital technologies are embedded in and, by extension, the multidimensional change processes they need to ignite. The goal is to provide a better understanding — and new avenues for research — why actions and changes in some environments tend to more readily embrace the new possibilities offered by digital technologies while others seem disconnected and are lagging behind.
Date Issued
2017-12-04
Date Acceptance
2017-10-31
Citation
Africa Journal of Management, 2017, 3 (3-4), pp.328-347
ISSN
2332-2373
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Start Page
328
End Page
347
Journal / Book Title
Africa Journal of Management
Volume
3
Issue
3-4
Copyright Statement
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDer-ivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution,and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or builtupon in any way.
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2017-12-04