INTENTIONALITY – PART II

At one level, the conflict between East and West that characterized much of the 20th century was between those who believed in centrally planned economies, and those who believed in free market economies – a debate over the importance of teleologic versus teleonomic approaches to economic development.

Management science has been schizophrenic with regard to intentionality. On the one hand, Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work recognizing the limitations on rationality in organizational decision making. His work and others illuminate the way in which organizational behavior exhibit patterns that transcend the intentions of any of the individuals within the organization. On the other hand, schools of management have been churning out students convinced that organizations have visions and missions, that can be turned into effective strategies and plans through the use of operations research and decision support systems, those in turn to be implemented utilizing management information systems and other tools of the information age.

In economics, the development of evolutionary economics by Richard Nelson and others expanded teleonomic ideas from the hidden hand of the marketplace, to include selective processes that determine the technologies and enterprises that exist in those marketplaces. Paul Romer (http://www.stanford.edu/~promer/) and Brian Arthur (http://www.santafe.edu/~wba/) are other names to come to mind as leaders in exploring how order arises out of complexity in economic systems. All three have been important in illuminating the role of technology in economic growth.

Now to get back to information and communications technology in developing nations. One school of workers in this field emphasizes the planning. It focuses on how ICT projects are planned. Project evaluation is emphasized. The intentions of the project planners is often that their approach is to be accepted by others who will replicate or scale up the projects. Sustainability of the projects into the future is of paramount concern.

Another school focuses on the growth of use of ICTs in developing nations as a social process. They see it as a process of “creative destruction”. Enterprises will be created. Some will be successful in the marketplace, and will prosper and grow. Others will fail. Rather than stress sustainability, emphasis may be placed on letting unsuccessful enterprises fail quickly.

Weibe Bijker is known for his sociological studies of the development of bicycles. We all have seen pictures of old fashioned bicycles, and Bijker has pointed out that originally the bicycle was seen as a means by which athletic young men could exercise. As society construed bicycles differently (e.g. as means for mass transportation, as objects for children) then their designs changed. The point I would seek to make, however, is that in retrospect, none of the early designs for bicycles is still in production. Does it make any sense to say that they all failed? I think not. In a larger sense, the bicycle was a great success. There was a lot of social learning that went on during the history of the bicycle, and that learning resulted in ramifications of its social construction. Today there are a lot of different kinds of bicycles produced successfully. However, if our current project planners had been around, their evaluations of bicycle projects would have been uniformly negative, pointing to lack of sustainability of the projects, and to lack of replication and scale up for almost all.

I think the same could be said in many technological revolutions: automobiles, radios, televisions, etc.

Again, I am not arguing that foolishness is good. There are a lot of ICT4D projects in the world that are badly designed, and will at best produce White Elephants. Those projects waste money and create bad will.

I am arguing that it is important to recognize our limited cognitive abilities. It is very difficult to predict the social construction of ICTs by poor people and in developing nations. We can predict with some confidence that the information revolution will eventually sweep the developing world, as it is sweeping the richer nations. Well designed projects can hasten the process.

I would say that projects should allow for considerable freedom of evolution of the efforts. Efforts should be focused on understanding what is happening, and whether it is good, bad or indifferent; not on whether the projects accomplish the intentions of the (outside) designers. Projects should be seen as high risk, and those that fail should generally be allowed to die a quick death. Sustainability is not an end in itself, nor is replication nor scale-up. For most of the ICT4D crowd, poverty reduction is the goal. The rapid dissemination of ICT infrastructure and its productive application is a means to that goal. ICT projects should be managed to contribute to those disseminations, and the ultimate goal, not as objectives in and of themselves.