The World is Bumpy: Power, Uneven Development and the Impact of New ICTS on South African Manufacturing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numerous academics and policy makers now assert Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) marginalization in the global economy is being reversed by an information technology revolution. However, while many claims are made for new ICTs - and mobile phones in particular - very little research has been done on the precise ways in which firms use these technologies and their developmental impacts. Drawing on over fifty firm-level interviews, this paper examines evidence of the uses and impacts of new ICTs in the wood products industry in Durban, South Africa and its surrounding region. In contrast to assumptions in much of the literature, it finds that rather than primarily being used to connect to global markets, they are most commonly used as technologies of local labour control and inter-firm competition. Consequently the use of these technologies may deepen existing inequalities and uneven development, and in some instances disinformationalisation, rather than reduce or overcome them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".