Short Abstract

This panel examines how firms in the Global South build digital technologies, combining in-house development and external platforms. It probes capability formation, economic value capture, and power asymmetries to ask when digital technologies enable inclusion beyond dependency.

Description

Digitalisation is recasting how firms in the Global South learn, produce, and compete. Yet “building digital technologies” rarely means only in-house development: firms in the Global South blend internal capabilities with external technologies, from global platforms and SaaS to vendor solutions and open-source tools. We investigate the economics, politics, and practices of these hybrid pathways through the lenses of technological learning, absorptive capacity, and technological upgrading in global value networks, while engaging with critiques of platform capitalism and data colonialism. The panel goes beyond deepening technological lock-in by interrogating how firm-level digital capability in the Global South can be grown in ways that redistribute power, value, and voice.

We invite contributions from both theoretical and empirical studies through technological capabilities and learning, absorptive capacity, and platform power and data colonialism lenses that examine:

1. When does buying external digital tech build firm-level capability, and when does it entrench dependency?

2. How do firms domesticate imported digital technologies to local workflows?

3. How do South–South, open-source, or indigenous digital tech knowledge flows accelerate firm-level absorptive capacity in the Global South?

4. How is the value generated by datafied production allocated, and how can firms in the Global South secure a fairer share?

5. How can policy, standards, and rules guide digitalisation to build firm-level local digital technology capabilities and absorptive capacity, and limit platform dominance and data extractivism?

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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