Penggunaan internet dalam kalangan usahawan wanita: akses, kemahiran dan motivasi

Kemajuan Internet telah membawa peluang-peluang baru untuk perkongsian dan pengumpulan pengetahuan dalam masyarakat. Internet boleh menyediakan peluang tanpa batasan untuk pembangunan ekonomi dan penglibatan sosial melalui alat dan pemikiran inovatif baru. Kajian ini bertujuan untuk meninjau penggunaan Internet dalam kalangan usahawan wanita, sesuai dengan fenomena perniagaan dalam talian yang memuncak masa kini. Usahawan wanita dalam kajian ini merujuk kepada mereka yang mempunyai misi dan visi sebagai usahawan berjaya dengan menjadikan Internet sebagai medium utama yang menggerakkan perniagaan mereka. Objektif kajian adalah untuk mengetahui pola penggunaan Internet dalam kalangan usahawan wanita dengan dimensi-dimensi yang telah dikenal pasti. Kaedah kuantitatif secara tinjauan telah dilakukan terhadap 402 orang usahawan wanita yang menjalankan perniagaan secara dalam talian (online). Dua kaedah tinjauan digunakan iaitu secara temu bual bersemuka dan secara pengisian dalam talian. Kajian ini juga mentakrifkan penggunaan Internet sebagai keupayaan dan pengalaman responden dari aspek kekerapan mengakses aplikasi Internet, kemahiran menggunakan Internet dan motivasi responden dalam menggunakan Internet juga turut dikenal pasti. Hasil dapatan menunjukkan bahawa aplikasi yang sering diakses dan digunakan adalah aplikasi yang menjadi perhatian ramai seperti WhatsApp, Facebook dan Instagram. Responden juga mempunyai kemahiran dan bermotivasi menggunakan Internet dalam kadar yang tinggi. Jelas, ini menunjukkan bahawa usahawan wanita sangat bergantung kepada penggunaan Internet dalam urusan perniagaan mereka dengan tahap kemahiran dan motivasi yang tinggi

Characterising e-Participation in sub-Saharan Africa: A thematic review of the literature

e-Participation is understood to bring about greater participation, transparency and accountability in governance processes. North America, Western Europe and many countries in the South East Asia region, are reported to have made strides in transforming their governance systems in order to be able to accommodate e-Participation. All these countries happen to be ruled by democratic regimes. Africa on the other hand, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, is reported mainly ruled by post-colonial regimes that are not always amenable to democracy. That background suggests that little is known about e-Participation in sub-Saharan Africa. A review of a selection of most influential works was performed with the aim of characterising e-Participation in sub-Saharan Africa. The findings of the review suggest that the narrative of e-Participation in sub-Saharan Africa does not provide a proper understanding of local e-Participation actors; mostly only accounts of government led projects and initiatives; mostly only accounts of the overwhelming burden of contextual factors; does not offer clear accounts of the effects of initiatives; and does not provide a thorough evaluation of projects. Further studies should empirically examine sub-Saharan African actors, their online interactions, the effects that e-Participation has had on their lives and on their communities; making use of context relevant evaluation approaches and methods

M-Governance for Countering Police Corruption in Nigeria - A Phenomenological Study of the Public Complaints Rapid Response Unit's Impact on Female Complainants

Dissertation (MA (Political Sciences))--University of Pretoria, 2021In 2016, the Nigerian Police Force launched a mobile governance initiative known as the Public Complaint Rapid Response Unit (PCRRU) to combat the country’s issue with widespread police corruption and brutality. The platform leverages the accessibility and prevalence of mobile phones to make reporting corrupt officers easier for civilians and to streamline the process of investigation. However, the Nigerian population still shows intense distrust of the police, coming to a head in 2020 with the #EndSARS protests. Furthermore, studies have shown that women are disproportionately affected by police corruption and brutality compared to other population groups. This study examines how women have interacted with the PCRRU, and how their perceptions of the PCRRU and the NPF have been influenced in various ways. Additionally, the study compares how women view and perceive the impact of the PCRRU to the actual impact that the platform has had on rates of police corruption in Nigeria. The goal of the study is to understand how m-governance can be used as a tool for improving governance in the hands of the state, as well as how civilians feel about m-governance in its capacity to improve governance, with a specific focus on women as a group that is disproportionally targeted by the state. A phenomenological approach was adopted in this study in order to centre the lived experiences of women, which have been historically underreported. The study uses semi-structured interviews and some relevant quantitative data in its analysis of the PCRRU and its impact. The study finds that, while m-governance can have a notable impact on public perceptions, it cannot precede “real world” political will and engagement with a given issue. In the case of the PCRRU, the impact on public perception and on corruption as a whole has been extant, but negligible. Overall, the impact the platform has had on the lived experiences of women have been limited to isolated cases, rather than a large-scale systemic reform. Based on these findings, the study recommends the adjustment of the PCRRU as a tool to combat corruption, and indeed m-governance strategies as a whole, to rather be a supplement to a wider policy or set of policies, as opposed to a solution on its own. This is especially relevant in other African countries, where the accessibility of mobile technology compared to other forms of communication is quickly making m-governance initiatives a norm.Political SciencesMAUnrestricte

An analytical tale of the social media discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance during the #feesmustfall social movement in South Africa

Social media are a space for discussions, debates and deliberations about personality, culture, society, and actual experiences of social actors in South Africa. They offer an unexpected opportunity for the broader consideration and inclusion of community members’ voices in governance decision making and policy processes. They also offer opportunities to engage, mobilise and change people and society in impressive scale, speed and effect: They have mobilising and transformative powers emanating from their interaction with the impetus of the agency of community members seeking better conditions of living. The magnitude of the effects of these powers makes it imperative to have a better understanding of their workings. Social media have been used in numerous social movements as the medium of communication to mobilise, coordinate, and broadcast protests. However, social media were never a guarantee of success as most movements using them did not achieve significant results. Yet, governments in developed and developing countries tend to engage inadequately with social media supported movements. The research problem is that the contribution of social media to the transformation of the social practice of discourse, which causes SSA community members’ agential impetus (collective intentionality for action) to generate a discourse of resistance on social media during social movements, is not well understood. The main research question is: Why are South African community members using social media to enact online discursive resistance during social movements? The aim of the research is to explain, from a critical realism point of view, Sub-Saharan African community members’ emergent usage of social media during social movements, by providing a contextualised social history (a tale) of South African community members’ practice of online discursive enactment of resistance. The emergent usage of social media of concern is conceptualised as “discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance” within a dialectical space of interaction conceptualised as “space of autonomous resistance”; an instance of a communication space allowing for transformative negation to occur. The research follows Bhaskar’s Critical Realism as a philosophical paradigm. Critical Realism seeks to explain phenomena by retroducing (retrospective inference) causal explanations from empirically observable phenomena to the generative mechanisms which caused them. The research was designed as a qualitative, processual and retroductive inquiry based on the Morphogenetic/Morphostasis approach with two phases: an empirical research developing the case of South African community members’ emergent usage of social media during the #feesmustfall social movement, looking for demi-regularities in social media discourse; and a transcendental research reaching into the past to identified significant events, objects and entities which tendencies are responsible for the shape of observed discourse. In the first phase, a case study was developed from data collected on the social media platform Twitter™, documents, and in-depth interviews of South African community members. The data collected were analysed using qualitative content analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to unveil demi-regularities; moving from the observable individual strategic orientation of messages to discourses, thus to the tendencies of relational emergent properties of systemic magnitude which structure local discourses and are transformed by them. Then, the social mediainduced morphogenesis or transformation of South African community members’ discursive action was postulated in an analytical history of emergence (or analytical tale) of their usage of social media within a “space of autonomous resistance” during social movements. The findings of the research suggest that South African community members authored 3 discourses of resistance on Twitter™: #feesmustfall discourses of struggle, identity and oppression. They identified as “student qua black-child” stepping into the “Freedom fighter” role against the hegemonic post-apartheid condition curtailing their aspirations. It was found that social media socio-cultural embeddedness and under-design (Western European socio-cultural globalising underpinning features and functional features of the platforms) which interaction with the local socio-cultural mix (postapartheid socio-cultural tendencies for domination/power, spiral of silence, and legitimacy/identification) resulted in misfits and workarounds enhancing individual emotional conflict and aligning towards a socio-cultural opportunistic contingent complementarity integration in the deployment of discourse. That integration was actualised as a mediatization emergent property through asignification/signification of mainstream discourses of liberal democracy, colonial capitalism, national democratic revolution, free and decolonised education, black consciousness and Fallism. That mediatization through re-signification of the struggle for freedom created a communication “space of autonomous resistance” where networked freedom fighters enacted discursive everyday resistance against the hegemonic forces of students’ precariousness. The contribution of the research includes a realist model of social media discursive action (ReMDA); an explanation of South African community members’ deployment of discourse over social media during social movement and telling the tale of the transformation of discursive practices with the advent of social media in South Africa