| dc.description.abstract | This PhD research thesis offers an historicised account of Silicon Savannah, a digital
technology entrepreneurship arena in Nairobi, Kenya. Silicon Savannah is an opportunity to
study the appropriation of technology innovation and commercialisation models in a lower
income, developing economy. Fieldwork took place over 2015-6, a period when this
embryonic ‘arena of development’ (Jorgensen and Sorensen, 1999) is subject to scrutiny about
its high, but largely unverified, hyped expectations. As a result, this thesis dwells on how
actors develop strategies to adopt and adapt to processes over which they have no discretion.
Actors in Silicon Savannah individually and collectively develop strategies and gaming
systems for enacting legitimacy and attracting resources. The analytical frame reveals a
dimension of persistent colonial modality inherent in the practice of global capitalism of which
the digital economy and ICT developmental projects are a part. This is indicated in policy
discourses of digital entrepreneurship that disclaim alternatives and multiplicities, and take for
granted that there is a standardised typology of progress. The result is a paradox where
entrepreneurs are incentivised to demonstrate alignment with discourses that might not reflect
their experience.
The study aims to produce a ‘view from Nairobi’ by integrating the interpretive frameworks
of the subjects of the study with the researcher’s analysis. Thus, it relies on ethnographic
interviews and observations, and historical reconstruction using resources preserved in
internet-based repositories like weblogs, emails and social media. Through this empirical
work, this study makes several contributions to knowledge: First, it produces a rich historical
account of Silicon Savannah as a zone of friction between ecologies of knowledge and
practice. In this way, it is conversant with ethnographies of policy implementation and
academic research interested in interactions between received prescriptions and local milieu.
Second, it its discussion of actors’ strategic use of ‘narrative infrastructures’ (Deuten and Rip,
2000) and engages with the use of narrative in the production of and practices in arenas of
development. Third, it discusses the perverse incentives and moral hazards that can emerge
from doctrinaire discourses, as observed in case studies exemplifying a range of organisations
that have social good imperatives and/or emphasise profit-making. Doing so callsinto question
this presumed dichotomy. A fourth contribution isto the performativity programme. The thesis
analyses how particular enactments act as proxies for capability in an arena characterised by
sharp asymmetries. These asymmetries are reflected in the fact that the ability to bestow
legitimacy and value is vested in distant geographies responsible for the promulgation of a
particular digital entrepreneurship discourse and practice. A fifth contribution is to the
coloniality school and the introduction of the methodological approach, ‘Africa as Method’,
which provides that this kind of research cannot be accomplished without the integration of
geographic and historical positionality. In the case of Kenya, this means paying attention to
power topologies, political economy, governance philosophies, the fact of geographical
hegemony and practices and relations characterised by the persistence of colonial modality.
The thesis concludes with a contemplation of the future – a discussion that emerges from
questioning whether a decolonised technoeconomic arena can flourish in a global digital
economy that is underpinned by modernist philosophy. | en |
