Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Unemployment is one of the major challenges that Indonesia faces. Home to over 230 million, Indonesia has an unemployment rate of 2.6 % among a labour force of 107.7 million (Badan Pusat Statistik 2010). Of this number, the working population is pegged at 104.9 million, comprising 66.8 million men and 38.1 million women (ibid.). The unemployment rate appears to be moderate. However, the Indonesian Statistics Bureau estimates that only 67.72 % of the working force is regularly employed. Therefore, the actual unemployment rate at any given time is higher than the official figure.

This paper examines the use and non-use of mobile communication in the food distribution system of Côte d’Ivoire. We examine how this mediation forms in the existing systems for producing, transporting and marketing of food by women in that country. We base the analysis on five focus groups and 51 interviews carried out between May 2012 and February 2013. We find that mobile communication allows for more responsive and flexible planning on the part of large- and small-scale wholesalers. They are able to use it to manage and adjust the delivery of products to different retailers as surpluses and shortages develop. We also find that the mobile phone is not used by some producers since there are well-established systems for the marketing of their products that preclude the need for mobile communication.

Public consultation is a formal mechanism of social participation where government invites citizens to participate in policymaking. Increasingly, public consultations are being held online, where Web 2.0 tools and other information and communication technology (ICT) tools become central to understand the design of virtual spaces for government-citizen interaction. Through the analysis of two case studies from Brazil—the “Gabinete Digital” and the “Marco Civil Regulatório” initiatives—this chapter discusses how online public consultation spaces are designed, using a combination of ICTs. Based on three frameworks of deliberative theory and characteristics of Web 2.0 tools, the aim of our paper is studying what aspects of Web 2.0 tools are useful for online consultation and what democratic environments they might generate when combined. The main contribution of this work is raising awareness on how the usage of certain Web 2.0 tools can reinforce or diminish some attributes of political communication and therefore, as a result, produce different models of online democratic communication.

This chapter focuses on the opinion expression of new-generation migrant workers and empirically examine its relationship with ICTs in China. It differentiates two kinds of problems that the migrant workers encounter, labour rights problems and personal emotion problems, as well as three types of expressive channels, interpersonal networks, new media, and institutional channels. By analysing the data from a questionnaire survey conducted in Shanghai of China ( = 869), we find that when faced with realistic problems, the intention of expression among new-generation migrant workers is relatively high on the whole. In terms of expressive channels, they would like to express more via interpersonal network, followed by new media channels, and least via institutional channels. The online news and online interaction have been found to be significantly related to the expressive intention through new media, although they have no direct impact on offline expression. We conclude this chapter by discussing the academic and practical implications of this study.

The rich data and analysis contained in this volume permit a number of lessons to be drawn, some of which resolve the questions identified by the authors and others which may inspire new inquiries. Looking at the variety of topics, disciplines and areas of research, a palpable conclusion is that ICT now pervades the lives of people throughout the world. This is unsurprising since ICTs are general purpose technologies, widely adopted, used and adapted by people of all ages worldwide and who are from different socioeconomic backgrounds. By focusing on the global south, however, one outstanding characteristic of the research relates to the different pace of use and appropriation within these countries. This is apparent in both the theoretical chapters and the evidence gathered from the empirical ones. Whatever the pace, it is apparent that ICT is having an impact on most economic sectors and social processes. This impact may be positive or negative and is not independent of the context into which ICT is inserted or the existing socioeconomic dynamics of that context.