Africa’s information revolution: technical regimes and production networks in South Africa and Tanzania
该书考察信息通信技术（ICT）在南非和坦桑尼亚家具与旅游业中的实际作用，发现ICT反而加剧了非洲在全球经济中的依赖与被剥削地位，对发展研究学者和经济地理学家有启发。
Over the past decade, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are widely treated as prescription to southern Africa’s underdeveloped economy by journalists, politicians and scholars. They have variously argued that the increasing accessibility to mobile phones and the Internet will strengthen the economic linkage between the continent and advanced economies, hence bringing out industrial upgrading and social improvement. Yet are ICTs really functioning in the predicted way in Africa? Murphy and Carmody, whose new book surveys the shift of southern Africa’s manufacturing and service sectors in relation to increasing ICTs penetration, offer a rather pessimistic viewpoint. Drawing on evidence from furniture and tourism industries in South Africa and Tanzania, they show that ICTs have placed Africa in a growingly dependent and exploited position in the global economy. The book is an experiment to study development issues with a toolkit from economic geography. To examine the realization of techno-developmentalism in Africa, Murphy and Carmody take a firm-centered multi-scalar approach. At intra-firm level, analytical attention focuses on the degree to which ICTs enhance firm capacities in aspects including business networking, information collecting and labor managing. At regional and global scales, the key question addressed is whether ICTs’ diffusion transforms local sociotechnical conditions like market structure and industrial organization, and adjusts the position of southern Africa in the world economy in ways that are supportive to the livelihood of individual firms. By solving this question with the assistance of revolutionary economic and Global Production Network (GPN) theories, the authors are able to situate firms experiencing information revolution ‘within the structural and relational context shaping their development’ (p. 114). The theoretical framework of this book is not only methodologically inspiring to scholars in development studies, but also eye-opening for traditional economic geographers, whose work could potentially provide analytical axis for a broader range of issues.