hi Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature (original) (raw)

2008, The Information Society

The paper reviews roughly 200 recent studies of mobile (cellular) phone use in the developing world, and identifies major concentrations of research. It categorizes studies along two dimensions. One dimension distinguishes studies of the determinants of mobile adoption from those that assess the impacts of mobile use, and from those focused on the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. A secondary dimension identifies a sub-set of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research. Boyera, Stéphane. 2007. The mobile web to bridge the digital divide? Paper read at IST-Africa Conference 2007, 09-11 May, at Maputo, Mozambique. Brown, Irwin, Zaheeda Cajee, Douglas Davies, and Shaun Stroebel. 2003. Cell phone banking: Predictors of adoption in South Africa--an exploratory study. International Journal of Information Management 23 (5):381-394. Caporael, Linnda R., and Bo Xie. 2003. Breaking time and place: Mobile technologies and reconstituted identities. In Machines that become us: The social context of personal communication technology, edited by J. E. Katz. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Cartier, Carolyn, Manuel Castells, and Jack Linchuan Qiu. 2005. The information have-less: Inequality, mobility, and translocal networks in Chinese cities. Studies in Comparative International Development 40 (2):9-34.