ABSTRACT

This book develops and examines the concepts and strategies for rural empowerment through the formation of a community-driven social knowledge management (SKM) framework aided by social technology. The framework is aimed at mobilizing knowledge resources to bridge the rural–urban knowledge divide while securing rural empowerment using digital connections and social collaborations built on strategies of self-sustenance and self-development. With key empirical findings supplemented by relevant theoretical structures, case studies, illustrative figures and a lucid style, the book combines social technologies and social development to derive a social knowledge management platform. It shows how the proposed SKM framework can enhance knowledge capabilities of rural actors by facilitating connection among rural–urban entities through formation of purposive virtual communities, which allow social agents to create, modify and share content collaboratively.

The volume brings forward diverse issues such as conceptual foundations; bridging the rural–urban knowledge and information divide; issues of information and knowledge asymmetry; a knowledge-theoretic perspective of rural empowerment; knowledge capability, freedom of choice and wellbeing, to provide a comprehensive outlook on building a knowledge society through digital empowerment.

This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of development studies, rural sociology, management studies, IT/IS, knowledge management and ICT for development, public policy, sociology, political economy and development economics. It will benefit professionals and policymakers, government and nongovernment bodies and international agencies involved with policy decisions related to application of technologies for rural development, social workers and those in the development sector.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

part I|100 pages

Rural empowerment

chapter 142|18 pages

Knowledge, knowledge divide and knowledge capability

A conceptual framework

chapter 3|18 pages

Rural empowerment

A knowledge–theoretic approach

chapter 5|22 pages

Information asymmetry and rural producers

part II|98 pages

Social knowledge management and social technologies

chapter 10|18 pages

Social knowledge management

A social technology-enabled framework to bridge knowledge asymmetry of rural producers through virtual community formation

part IV|17 pages

What tomorrow may bring

chapter 30214|7 pages

Summary and discussions