Developmental Discourse: a Critical Analysis

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how information and communications technology (ICT) has become deeply involved in the conception and practice of socio-economic development within so-called less-developed countries (LDCs). A recent speech on ICT by the president of the World Bank Group is examined, which shows the role of the discourse surrounding such technologies in replicating and extending a markedly North American worldview into the developmental sphere. The ability of critical discourse analysis to expose the involvement of ICT in normalising a dominant set of political and economic assumptions confirms its usefulness as a tool within which to approach the critical study of information systems.