'Intelligent' Development: Technical Organisation and Social Policy in the New Millenium. ABSTRACT This public lecture discusses the ways in which new 'intelligent' technologies can be used to enable and assist low income individuals, communities and societies, to more fully participate both in economic life and governance.
Margaret Grieco, Professor of Organisation and Development Management, the Business School, University of North London
Opening The Door To A Virtual Policy Framework
Today, I want to take you on a journey through the fastly opening door of new technologies into a virtual policy and business environment. The journey is forward looking though not futuristic: many of its landscapes we will all have explored in some part already in the business of our daily lives. The purpose of today's journey is to put each of these partial landscapes or views of the power of new technologies into a cohesive framework which permits us to think of a radical reorganisation of social, economic and political life.New information technologies allow us to bring activities to where we are, activities which in the past would have required us each and individually to transport ourselves to specific physical points of delivery. The bank, the shop, the town hall meeting, the school, the university, the workplace, the board meeting, the library. Historically, each of these would have required a physical visit in order to obtain service; now we can obtain these services without the need to make physical journeys provided we have available to us the existing in-home technologies to activate delivery.
From our residences and from our workplaces we can go into a world rich in activities through the power of the personal computer and the interaction matrix of the internet. We can at the touch of a button cross regions and reduce the communication distances that traditionally polarised the world in terms of access to information and knowledge - and consequently, resources and power. Last week I attended an audio conference where the organising committee of an Africa initiated distance learning conference (GhaCLAD) discussed the meaty detail of its business on simultaneous links between Ghana, a set of sites in the US and London. The business of the conference is served by a web site and the bulk of coordination takes place through email. Because of the compound power of the new technologies, it is possible to make international planning arrangements for the Ghana distance learning conference with local Ghanaian ownership without any sacrifice in efficiency. The Ghanaian conference is an example of intelligent development - the conference, an intelligent process and an intelligent event, has a permanent counterpart in the African Virtual University developed in cooperation between a set of African institutions and the World Bank.
The African Virtual University enables African institutions to cooperate in the delivery of knowledge across distance - the logic upon which this institution is built promises Africa affordable higher education in a context where the public and private resources for education are highly constrained. The knowledge technology revolution not only enables Africa to readily receive the high quality of information and education materials available globally on open access web sites (Harvard University already delivers a course on Globalisation in this mode and Birkbeck College in the United Kingdom has a suite of courses it puts out through open access web sites), importantly, it also enables local African organisations to input into knowledge production and dissemination at radically lower costs and with readier logistics than were historically the case.
Distance learning and knowledge development for Africa is not simply a matter of receiving materials produced elsewhere for absorption and digestion but rather represents a new form of opportunity to influence and shape knowledge development from an African perspective - a perspective which was lost historically in the communication dominance of the West. With the advent of virtual publishing on the internet, the costs of establishing printing presses can be bypassed - text is downloaded as needed at the local site, the purchasing, shipping and processing of books through customs is no longer the inevitable nightmare of the African academic or development worker. An appropriate form of collecting and disseminating materials now exists. Appropriate knowledge can be imported into or exported from an African destination at will - it may be health knowledge concerned with malaria arriving in Africa from the wellstocked laboratories of the west, it may be local knowledge about the growing resistance of malaria to the conventional forms of treatment which is exported from Africa into the western laboratory. The new communications mode provides bi-lateral accessibility - a transport term indicating that the opening of a new road allows traffic in both directions - and to a degree that was never achievable by radio or television or even the simple telephone.
The traffic on the communication highway is in both directions - and the possibility of ready feedback into the traditional centres of knowledge development permits a level of fine tuning on all areas of policy never previously experienced. The new technology provides for direct consumer and client empowerment across the range of social, economic and political issues. A key international example of the potential for client empowerment can be found in the Global Knowledge virtual conference established by the Canadian Government in conjunction with the World Bank - it is a site which has established a whole new and well used channel for client feedback into one of the most powerful of the donor institutions. For the client of development, the new communications technology coupled with the expanse of institutions that fill its space with knowledge production and dissemination enables the easy acquisition of what was previously specialist knowledge. In feeding back information to organisations, clients and consumers can readily inform themselves of alternative arrangements made by other competing organisations. Through means of virtual libraries and specialist web sites the African academic and policy maker who was previously disadvantaged in international expert discussions and policy formulation by the absence of up to date expert materials locally can now enter the full range of international debate and globally available materials.
We have opened the door. Intelligent education policy development is clearly taking place in the African environment - the very environment which is most marked by poor economic performance and historically by a highly deficient communications structure. Africa is now on line - and the development agencies (USAID, World Bank, UNDP) and grass roots organisations in Africa (VTA and TOOL; ABANTU) are actively pursuing the expansion of Africa's on line capacity. Governments and the private sector, with the notable exception of South Africa, have still to display the same level of commitment to the changes - there is no equivalent of an on-line state such as Singapore or rapidly up-wiring country as the Philipines in Africa. But intelligent development is clearly underway and education and health are two of the key sectors in which we can already see and further expect rapid developments.
The arguments about whether the advent of the information revolution would produce a polarisation of national and world society or whether it would produce a democratisation or equalising of opportunity have been many. The speed of the technological developments coupled with the greatly expanded range of activities they can undertake have changed the contours of these arguments substantially and almost overnight. Under the old polarising scenario which equated access to high technology solely with wealth and saw technological developments as necessarily leading to increased control in the hands of the already powerful, Africa would have been viewed as the very last candidate for virtual education developments.
The door to the virtual policy environment has not been opened simply by the existence of the technology with its bilateral or global accessibility capabilities. Rather it is opened by the organisation of individuals, institutions and governments as they seek to achieve their own goals. The concept of developing large scale feed back into key development institutions was greatly accelerated and expanded by the use of web sites by competing parties to service the last American presidential election. Ross Perot, a technology developer himself, produced the concept of an electronic town hall where referenda could be held individual item by item at very low cost in the late 1980s/ early 1990s - large scale direct democracy was now for the first time in history, he noted, possible. The electronic participation of America in the last presidential electoral races - albeit not yet as electronic voters - demonstrated the viability of the modes.
And these modes are now with us in various shapes and forms in Britain - electronic consultation was invited in yesterday's Budget by the Chancellor Gordon Brown. Similarly, the call went out for electronic consultation on the Freedom of Information Act. Electronic consultation is clearly working its way into favour and through the policy door of British society. Brent Council is involved in online budget consultations at present and is piloting other electronic consultation initiatives. Both the Government's electronic consultation on the Freedom of Information Act and the Brent Budget electronic consultation are organised through the services of UK Citizens On Line Democracy. This web site is also hosting electronic discussions and consultations on :
Transport: Which way ahead?
The future of the UK constitution
Britain and European Monetary Union
and, most importantly for our purpose here today,
Electronic delivery of Government services
The virtual policy environment is clearly imminent within our own society and yet I doubt whether the majority in our society yet realise how far that door has already opened and the consequences of its opening for the empowerment of those on low income and with constrained physical mobility.
Social Technology: Intelligent Development For The Low Income Environment
We have travelled from Africa with the help of Perot (the founder of the concept of electronic direct democracy), Wolfensohn (President of the World Bank and the push behind many of the innovative African connectivity initiatives), Clinton (the Clinton- Gore electronic electoral campaigns demonstrated the way forward to both Bank and UK consultation initiatives), Blair (the ultimate sponsor of the UK democracy on line site) to Ken Livingstone's (Brent's site) electronic London. We have shown the democratising power of the technologies - democratising, however, subject to a key condition.
The condition is that of easy access to this new universe of communication and action through in-home or in-work information technologies. Singapore has terminals on the streets where any citizen can enter its communication and policy universe. America has seen an enormous growth in the possession of in-home communication technologies amongst older persons - a factor which has enabled senior citizens to become a highly effective political and consumer force within the United States.
Britain seems to be set on a path which ignores at least a key element in the new information technology/ democratisation equation. The in-home access of low income individuals and communities to the new information technology has been ignored. In a context where on line electronic consultation has already begun on key social and economic issues such as budgets and freedom of information, this can be viewed as a form of electronic disenfranchisement. At the level of the virtual policy environment alone, we should be awake to and aware of the ways in which electronic communication can empower the disabled and those on low income.
We have already seen that transport is one of the key areas for discussion upon the UK democracy on line web site - those on low income and those who are disabled are critical constituencies in any progressive public debate on transport. Technology support for their participation is essential if their interests are not to be drowned out by those who are better resourced and have the ready access to the technology.
Developing a social technology policy which ensures in-home information technologies purely for purposes of citizen participation is a noble ambition but it is not one that is likely to win the argument for the allocation of resources to meet this low income and disability need. It's time to open our door a little further and think through what the comprehensive availability of in-home information technologies can bring. If this seems futuristic, then we need to remember the developments in Singapore. Let's see what tools we have to aid us.
In the search for a solution to the problems of congestion, remember the transport discussion is a priority item for Government in the present both in Britain and globally, we need to be discussing ways in which we can reduce the total number of trips made. In-home information technologies give us a mechanism for reducing the number of trips made by bringing those activities to where we are - electronic banking, electronic shopping electronic work, electronic education, electronic reservation of tickets and hospital appointments and equally important electronic cancellation, and in the future, electronic diagnosis, all can make an important contribution to trip reduction. Solving congestion will necessarily involve the development of tele-strategies and for telestrategies to work effectively there needs to be mass access to in-home communication technologies. Reducing the current barriers to low income access to information technology is a transport priority if congestion is to be successfully tackled.
Sticking with the issue of transport for the moment, there have been developments in the field of transport informatics (information technology applied to transport) which change the traditional system whereby the passenger moves towards the vehicle. It is now possible for public transport vehicles to be called through a smart card system to where the passenger requires to be picked up. Intelligent systems can organise routings and bookings to provide efficient public transport which arrives where the passenger is. In the rural areas of Perugia, passengers place their key or smart cards into a receptor at the bus stop which then calls a bus for them. Clearly, in urban areas such facilities may be open to vandalism, in home provision of smart calling facilities removes this particular problem. The development of in-home calling capabilities for public transport for special categories of passengers, such as the disabled or low income single mothers trying to meet employers reliability needs on new welfare to work programmes, would be an ideal candidate for such provisions. In Angouleme in France, the passenger can determine when the bus will arrive at the closest stop to their home from, because of French public in-home information technology provision, within the home itself. This has all sorts of security benefits for public transport passengers, most particularly women. In discussing the need to assist the movement of single mothers from welfare to work, there has been almost no discussion of what the mobility constraints on single mothers are. In much of Britain on low income estates, transport provision is poor, public transport journeys are slow and the public system has low reliability. The lack of reliability in the public transport system has a clear consequence for the ability of single mothers to be reliable in the work place. In a context, where telephone access is not affordable and public transport is poorly organised and where the multiple roles of the working mother place heavy scheduling demands upon her, a sickness event with a child can be enough to jeopardise employment.
A single mother with in-home access to information technology through the provision of a networked terminal could make arrangements for alternative child care to cater for the child's sickness; call responsive transport which enables meeting the sickness needs of the child and the employer's need for reliability; send a message to the workplace that she would not be available on that day and book a replacement for her labour from a replacement worker service (something similar to bank nurses or relief teachers) and conduct a whole gamut of other activities through an intranet service provided on a community basis. Community nets already operate in Canada and we would argue are the essential other side of the welfare to work equation. Simply requiring single mothers to intensify their task load can not work as a long term measure, not least because the unpredictability of child sickness events will have consequences for their reliability as labour. The child care arrangements which have been discussed to date all assume that child care will be required when the child is well; it is the failure to make provision for sickness events which will create the problems.
Networked terminals or community nets can enable women to work from the home. A key assumption of the welfare to work scheme for single mothers, as it has been conceived, is that single mothers must leave the home for the workplace. The more natural logic given the character of recent technology developments, the transport crisis and the increasing number of women who operate businesses from home as a way of simultaneously meeting income earning and childcare responsibilities, is to think in terms of enabling single mothers to earn from their homes.
Through community nets women at home can make contact with electronic employers or electronic business opportunities. Small craft producers can reach major markets at very little cost through the internet - the advent of the female home business indicates that we ought to be thinking of welfare to work policy in these terms.
Entrepreneurs need start up capital - many home businesses, however, have started up on relatively little borrowed capital. And the existence of networked terminals or community net facilities in low income homes raises the issue of a different way of doing banking. Taking ourselves back out to the world of low income countries, the Grameen bank in Bangladesh has achieved a major success in banking history - it has placed a mass microbanking facility in the field and has returned a profit. Lending takes place through groups of women and the Grameen bank has now brought the lap top and the internet to the agricultural fields of Bangladesh to enable the further development of this experiment. New microbanking technologies allow major banks to monitor large portfolios of small risks without incurring the administrative chaos which would have been the case historically.
The microbanking experiments of low income countries show a path for the low income communities and neighbourhoods of Britain. The physical accessibility problems of low income communities and neighbourhoods could be greatly offset by in-home communication technologies which allowed microbanking services to be delivered into single mothers in their homes. The United States has started exploring microbanking experiments within its inner cities though these do not yet seem to be fully coupled with the advents in information technology that enable the easy management of such risk portfolios. Microbanking coupled with technologies which enabled easy access to capital for the small home based entrepreneur and which provided ready monitorability of large numbers of small low income risks by the banks could be a happy marriage in the luggage of the welfare to work programme. Britain's high street banks have begun to declare their interest in social banking at the same time as rural communities are complaining of the loss of their local banking facilities - home banking and home credit are already on the map. Converting these into useful social movements for those on low income and home bound would represent an intelligent development within Britain.
In Finland, there have already been major adaptations of the new information technologies which enable older persons to live in 'intelligent' homes which meet their needs and reduce their dependence on others. As society ages, and it is a global phenomenon, then intelligent homes are increasingly going to be one of the ways in which societies cut their welfare bills. At present, there is much talk of the suite of new information technologies which are about to arrive in the school house and for new generations the operation of information technologies will be a natural state of affairs, however, the need to equip older persons for the information age has been greatly overlooked. Presently, we are entering electronic discussions about the electronic delivery of government services in the virtual environment whilst failing to skill those who are likely to be the users of these services when they arrive in the early decades of the new millenium. Education, education, education - but not for the older generations it seems. We need to give thought to providing a life time based approach to education - the speed with which technology changes makes it no longer appropriate to think of childhood education as the apprenticeship for life. Investing in the young is not sufficient: if the costs of welfare are to be reduced by the electronic delivery of services, then our older persons need training too.
A Virtual Conclusion: The Opportunities For Rethinking Work, Welfare And Technology
Moving through Europe's transport problems and solutions, through Asia's microcredit innovations, through the welfare to work schemes of US/ UK policy twins, we have arrived at the ageing agenda which perhaps is a useful place to begin the close to our arguments.
The decline in family size and the ageing of the population has consequences which have great implications for the pattern of social relations in future society but which have been neglected by policymakers and social scientists alike. Across the world, the solution to the welfare crisis, in which the ageing of society plays a key part, is seen to lie in the resort to the family. Placing responsibility back with the family and care in the community are the slogans which accompany the policies of welfare reform. But the structure of families has changed: the family sizes which supported extended family structures with their host of informal welfare provisions have gone. And the pressure is towards having even smaller families, with the consequence that families, like the demography of the society itself, will come to have more members outside of working age than members within it.
Developing community nets enables seniors to continue working beyond the traditional retirement age and enables older persons to meet their own sociability requirements through communal activities and self help. The real pressure in the welfare system will increasingly be at the older end of life and not with single mothers. Enabling older persons to continue their participation in the work force and enabling their full social participation in the full range of citizen activities through appropriate social technology may be the real challenge of the next millenium. Enhancing the communication capabilities of those willing to work either in conventional employment or as providers of volunteer services in the welfare sector may be the major welfare consideration.
There is a virtual solution: its architecture needs our consideration collectively as a polity and from each of our respective constituencies. Electronic consultation permits the expansion of the number of active voices in the decisionmaking process and demographic change is producing new constituencies which require inclusion and recognition. Grey power is a new phenomenon. It's our job both as community and experts to consult on needs and develop a technical organisation for our society which meets social, economic and political purposes.
One instrument can provide value in all three areas - the advent of a comprehensive in-home information technology. Technology companies alert to this emergent social policy direction are already beginning to explore the territory. Beyond the minitel of France and towards the intelligent integration of Singapore - the British virtual solution needs some help with its birth. The birth of a new Britain with a new concept of work and labour - and a social technology which it can sell to the rest of the world.
Biography and relevant publications of the speaker.
Margaret Grieco holds her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. She has worked on transport and technology issues for a range of agencies and institutions. Previous work, undertaken whilst Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana, has focused on gender and transport issues and upon distance learning in Africa. At the World Bank, she was involved in gender planning for Africa and developed the initial gender home page for the Africa region of the World Bank.
At Christmas and on rainy days: transport, travel and the female traders of Accra. Ed. with Apt, N. and J. Turner, Avebury, 1996.
Transport investment and the inner city. Avebury, under licence from H.M.S.O, 1994
'New technology, new horizons: the prospect of more client focused development banking' with Steve Denning, World Bank, in Maintaining the momentum of Beijing: the contribution of African gender NGOs. Ed. N. A. Apt and N. Agyemang-Mensah, Avebury: Aldershot, 1998
Development and the ageing of populations. In press UN Five yearly report on ageing. UN: New York
'Older people's role in development' in In spite of poverty.... the contribution of older people to development. American Association of Retired Persons, African-american Institute and the United Nations, Washington D.C. 1997
'Independence and interdependence: averting the poverty of older persons in an ageing world' United Nations Bulletin on Ageing, 1997
'Time pressures and low income families: the implications for 'social' transport policy in Europe." Community Development Journal, 1995.
'Urbanisation, caring for the elderly and the changing African family: the challenge to social welfare and social policy', with Nana Apt. International Social Security Review, 1994.
'A change in the policy climate? Current European perspectives on road pricing' with P.M. Jones. Urban Studies, October, 1994.
'Spinning a web: networking European technical convergence.' With C. Wells. Paper delivered to the French Public Administration Society conference on 'The end of sovereignty', Brussels, Palais de Congress, October 1990, Organisation Studies, December, 1993.
Route guidance and parking information, management and enforcement technologies: A summary of supply and demand side sensitivities in the U.K. A report prepared for the SIRIUS consortium, DRIVE Programme Project V1065, DG. 13 European Commission, April 1991.
1 For the opportunity to give this paper, a special thanks to the Dean of the Business School, the University of North London. For the company along the path towards these ideas, my thanks to the students of the University of Reading, the University of Amsterdam, Georgetown University and the University of Ghana, Accra, who put up with concepts that seemed more than a little like science fiction at the time. For the technical push to marry social aims with information technology, uncomfortable as that push sometimes was, my thanks to the European DRIVE Programme and to the Africa Region of the World Bank. For support when the push hurt, the friends and institutions who helped me talk the issues through as I waited for the development of internet discussion groups, thanks!.
Presented at the University of North London.
Back to the Home Page.