Exploring E-Commerce to migrate Rural Women's Income-Generating Projects towards Profitable Small Enterprise Development

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The application of E-commerce as both a poverty alleviation strategy and micro-enterprise building tool has failed to deliver on some of the commonly held 'silver bullet' expectations, such as radically enhanced business efficiencies and increased market opportunities. Consequently the application of ICT to socio-economic development continues to baffle and frustrate government policy makers, academics, researchers and practitioners alike. Many of the questions relating to blending business, development and ICTs remain unanswered, and often unasked. Using technology as a development tool has often, disastrously neglected the multifaceted and multi disciplinary considerations that relate to people. Bringing the benefits of ICTs to micro-enterprises in developing countries is a challenging task often undertaken with little research. This paper aims to contribute to the debate through contextualist and interpretivist research conducted with a successfully established South African rural women's development organization in Limpopo, South Africa. Using a conceptual framework of development, marketing and E-commerce to guide an in-situ participative action research project, decision makers perceptions relating to the usefulness, application and intended appropriation of marketing and E-commerce in small business development are explored. Actor-Network Theory, where technology implementation is viewed as a symmetrical treatment of technology and society within a single collective, is used as the interpretivist lens to view the consequences of the social context into which the ICTs were introduced. The main findings of the research address the importance, interaction and interplay between development, marketing and E-commerce.