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Imagining the State through Digital Technologies: A Case of State-Level Computerization In the Indian Public Distribution System
The theory on which the thesis is developed views technology as embedded in its socio- political context, and conceives e-governance as implicated in the reconstruction of images of the state. This vision is applied to the computerization of the main food security programme in India, the Public Dist...
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| Format: | Printed Book |
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London
London School of Economics and Political Science
2014
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| Online Access: | http://10.26.1.76/ks/004863.pdf |
| Summary: | The theory on which the thesis is developed views technology as embedded in its socio-
political context, and conceives e-governance as implicated in the reconstruction of images
of the state. This vision is applied to the computerization of the main food security
programme in India, the Public Distribution System (PDS), as it has been devised and
implemented in the state of Kerala. Through an interpretive case study of the object at the
core of computerization, known as the Electronic Public Distribution System or e-PDS, the
thesis investigates the ICT-led processes of image construction by the state, and the ways in
which citizens, confronted with new images, structure their perception of these.
Through inclusion of front-end PDS services in existing infrastructure, and through the
inscription of a clear problem-solution nexus in e-PDS, the state is found, as expected, to be
using e-governance as a means to reconstruct its own image. At the same time, though, the
loci of image formation that are found in citizens (direct experience, social networks, and
political circuits) systematically escape control by governmental action, and seem to be, in
fact, only marginally touched by the ICT-induced reinvention of governance. The thesis
results, therefore, in an extension of existing theory in this respect: the capability of the state
to reconstruct its image, through the usage of new technologies, is limited by the spaces of
image formation which citizens experience in their daily lives. |
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| Item Description: | A thesis submitted to the Department of Management of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy |