Taking Prahalad high-tech: the emergence and evolution of global corporate citizenship in the IT industry

In this paper, I analyse the emergence and evolution of e-Inclusion, HP’s flagship global corporate citizenship programme, as a landmark in the history of corporate citizenship in the IT industry. This programme, which existed from 2000 to 2005, was the first explicit attempt by a major high-tech company to operationalise the theories of C.K. Prahalad, by implementing a direct and an indirect bottom-of-the-pyramid (bop) strategy. The first led to the development of pilot programmes that worked directly with the rural poor to test bop products, services and business models and to create new sources of income for project participants. The second strategy saw e-Inclusion establish collaborations with public-sector organisations which until then had been peripheral to HP’s business, but were recognised as vital for e-Inclusion’s operations and HP’s emerging market success. I argue that important lessons can be drawn from this flagship corporate citizenship programme, which can make current IT initiatives more sustainable and meaningful

The marketization of poverty

Increasingly, transnational corporations (TNCs) see themselves, and are seen by multilateral development organizations and national governments, as part of the solution to global poverty alleviation. Guided by C. K. Prahalad's theories about the "bottom of the pyramid" (BoP), TNCs are developing products and services for the billions of people living on a few dollars a day that are supposed to enable these poor people to enterprise themselves out of poverty. In the process, poverty and the poor are made amenable to market interventions by being constituted as a potential new market for TNCs. Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) e-Inclusion program was the first corporate-wide BoP initiative in the high-tech industry that aimed to create corporate and social benefits. An analysis of its companyinternal evolution from an intrapreneurial initiative to a fully incorporated business operation is complemented by a study of e-Inclusion's activities in Costa Rica, which aimed to improve the lives of rural Costa Ricans by providing access to HP technology and by creating new sources of income for electronic entrepreneurs. However, transforming the poor into protoconsumers of TNC products and services cannot address the structural drivers of their circumstances and will lead to neither the eradication of poverty nor a corporate fortune at the BoP. © 2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved

Heterogeneity and standardization in data, use, and annotation : a diachronic corpus of German

This paper describes the standardization problems that come up in a diachronic corpus: it has to cope with differing standards with regard to diplomaticity, annotation, and header information. Such highly heterogeneous texts must be standardized to allow for comparative research without (too much) loss of information

Incorporated citizens: multinational high-tech companies and the BoP

In this article, I examine HP’s e-Inclusion program and its implementation in India to show how the high-tech industry’s efforts to alleviate poverty profitably are guided by C. K. Prahalad’s ideas about the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP), and are framed as digital corporate citizenship activities. While the BoP highlights the importance of new markets for high-tech companies, the discourse of digital corporate citizenship creates an enabling environment in which transnational high-tech companies can gain political access to new consumers at the BoP. The resulting digital corporate citizenship/BoP nexus leads to the extension of governments’ bureaucratic reach and the formation of electronic entrepreneurs

Self-reflection as dialectic: How we can follow the Delphian calling to self-knowledge whilst avoiding Narcissus' fate

Self-reflection refers to our ability to think about ourselves and our lives and to ask and answer questions ranging from "Who am I?" to "Why did I do this?". It is thus considered a valuable means to gain self-knowledge. Structurally, reflection involves two elements, a reflecting and a reflected-on, in other words a subject and an object. In the case of self- reflection, subject and object are the same, the reflecting is the reflected-on. As subject and object are traditionally conceived of as radically opposed i.e. mutually exclusive, this situation has led to considering self-reflection problematic: If self-reflection is always reflection on an object, it is thought that self-reflection cannot yield insight into oneself qua subject and might even represent a danger to one’s subjectivity which is characteristic of lived life. Refuting the mutual exclusiveness of subject and object, self-reflection can be regained as a valuable means to gain self-knowledge. It is thereby going to be demonstrated that self-reflection has a dialectical structure. The nature of the self-knowledge yielded by self-reflection conceived of as dialectic is going to be explored. A final part shows how a dialectical account of self- reflection proves useful in clarifying the role which self-reflection plays in schizophrenia

Predicting nitrogen mineralization from soil organic matter - a chimera?

Predicting nitrogen (N) mineralization from soil organic matter is difficult because N mineralization is affected by several environmental factors, while being the net outcome of concurrent N processes that produce and consume mineral N. One aim of the present thesis was to study the effects of freezing and thawing on carbon (C) and N mineralization. A second aim was to elucidate if, and how, the quantity and quality of organic matter inputs affect N mineralization from the pool of soil organic matter. C and net N mineralization were determined in soils from the Ultuna Long-Term Soil Organic Matter Experiment exposed to repeated freezing and thawing (temperatures ranging from –5 °C to +5 °C). C, gross and net N mineralization in relation to quantity and quality of organic matter inputs were determined during long-term laboratory incubations at 20 °C. Gross N mineralization rates were estimated using the 15N isotope dilution technique, which is based on several assumptions. The assumption of ‘equilibrium between added and native N’ was tested by using a published data set in a dynamic compartmental model. Freezing and thawing of soils resulted in a flush in C and N mineralization, but the effect was only short-lived. It was concluded that freezing and thawing of soils during late winter and early spring is unlikely to be of importance to crop N availability in spring. Both quantity and quality of organic matter were major determinants of C and gross N mineralization, and these were proportional suggesting that C mineralization may be used as a predictor for gross N mineralization. Preferential use of added N may be a more common occurrence in 15N isotope dilution studies than hitherto thought and the assumption of ‘equilibrium between added and native N’ needs therefore critical evaluation. The data analysis presented in this thesis offers a way to estimate the potential effects of preferential use on gross N mineralization rate estimates. This thesis indicates that studies based on the mechanisms underlying N processes may improve our understanding of the relation between soil organic matter and N mineralization. Further mechanistic studies should therefore be considered in future N research

New media practices in India: bridging past and future, markets and development

This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in India, focusing on the country’s youth's use of mobile phones and the Internet, as well as new media prosumption. One particular feature of the Indian case is the confluence of commercial exploitation of new media technologies and their application for development purposes in initiatives that aim to bring these technologies to marginalized segments of the Indian population. Technology usage in turn is shaped by the socioeconomic location of the user, especially in regards to gender and caste. The potential of new media technologies to subvert such social stratifications and associated norms has inspired much public debate, which is often carried out on the Internet, giving rise to an online public sphere. In all of the writings reviewed here, the tension surrounding new media technologies as a meeting place of the old and the new in India is paramount