Information and Organization: A New Perspective on the Theory of the Firm
Information and Organization: A New Perspective on the Theory of the Firm
The global digital divide in the Internet: developed countries constructs and Third World realities
Journal of Information Science
Information Technologies and International Development
Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (Information Revolution & Global Politics)
Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (Information Revolution & Global Politics)
Information Technologies and International Development
Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature
The Information Society
A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs)
ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development
Subword variation in text message classification
HLT '10 Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subword and spatiotemporal models for identifying actionable information in Haitian Kreyol
CoNLL '11 Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Short message communications: users, topics, and in-language processing
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
Considering failure: eight years of ITID research
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
Anthropology, development and ICTs: slums, youth and the mobile internet in urban India
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
ICT access and use by microentrepreneurs in Mumbai, India: a value chain model analysis
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
Innovating the field level of microfinance: a Pakistan case study
Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
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Informational challenges---absence, uncertainty, asymmetry---shape the working of markets and commerce in many developing countries. For developing country micro-enterprises, which form the bulk of all enterprises worldwide, these challenges shape the characteristics of their supply chains. They reduce the chances that business and trade will emerge. They keep supply chains localised and intermediated. They make trade within those supply chains slow, costly, and risky. Mobile telephony may provide an opportunity to address the informational challenges and, hence, to alter the characteristics of trade within micro-enterprise supply chains. However, mobile telephony has only recently penetrated. This paper, therefore, presents one of the first case studies of the impact of mobile telephony on the numerically-dominant form of enterprise, based around a case study of the cloth-weaving sector in Nigeria. It finds that there are ways in which costs and risks are being reduced and time is saved, often by substitution of journeys. But it also finds a continuing need for journeys and physical meetings due to issues of trust, design intensity, physical inspection and exchange, and interaction complexity. As a result, there are few signs of the de-localisation or disintermediation predicted by some commentators. An economising effect of mobile phones on supply chain processes may therefore co-exist with the entrenchment of supply chain structures and a growing “competitive divide” between those with and without access to telephony.