Digital technologies exacerbating mission drift in microfinance institutions: Evidence from India

IF 5.7 2区 管理学 Q1 INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE Information and Organization Pub Date : 2024-11-30 DOI:10.1016/j.infoandorg.2024.100541
Nidhi S. Bisht , Ernesto Noronha , Arun Kumar Tripathy
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Abstract

Digital technologies (DTs) are increasingly recognized as crucial in addressing social issues related to inequality and enhancing the well-being and agency of socially marginalized groups. We however, provide evidence that, instead of alleviating social inequalities, use of DTs (re)produced and exacerbated these inequalities in disparate forms, for an already marginalized population. Based on a qualitative study of employees from five microfinance institutions (MFIs) in India that offer uncollateralized group loans to poor rural women, our findings demonstrate how the pursuit of financial gains through DTs in providing microfinance exacerbated mission drift in MFIs, leading to reduced quality and depth of outreach. The use of DTs undermined social and human capital development — both crucial for alleviating poverty — and widened exclusion rather than bridging the gap. We explicate the quality of outreach (i.e., quality of services provided) as an additional dimension of social outreach, alongside the depth of outreach (i.e., reaching poorer borrowers) for understanding mission drift. Our findings call for consideration of existing intersectional social inequalities when leveraging DTs for social causes.
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数字技术加剧了小额信贷机构的使命漂移:来自印度的证据
人们日益认识到,数字技术在解决与不平等有关的社会问题、提高社会边缘群体的福祉和能动性方面至关重要。然而,我们提供的证据表明,对于已经被边缘化的人群来说,DTs的使用非但没有缓解社会不平等,反而以不同的形式(重新)产生并加剧了这些不平等。基于对印度五家向贫困农村妇女提供无抵押团体贷款的小额信贷机构(mfi)员工的定性研究,我们的研究结果表明,通过提供小额信贷的小额信贷机构追求财务收益如何加剧了小额信贷机构的使命漂移,导致外展的质量和深度下降。DTs的使用破坏了社会和人力资本的发展——这两者对减轻贫困都至关重要——并且扩大了排斥,而不是缩小差距。我们将外展的质量(即提供的服务质量)解释为社会外展的一个额外维度,与外展的深度(即接触较贫穷的借款人)一起,以理解使命漂移。我们的研究结果呼吁在利用DTs进行社会事业时考虑现有的交叉社会不平等。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
11.20
自引率
1.60%
发文量
18
期刊介绍: Advances in information and communication technologies are associated with a wide and increasing range of social consequences, which are experienced by individuals, work groups, organizations, interorganizational networks, and societies at large. Information technologies are implicated in all industries and in public as well as private enterprises. Understanding the relationships between information technologies and social organization is an increasingly important and urgent social and scholarly concern in many disciplinary fields.Information and Organization seeks to publish original scholarly articles on the relationships between information technologies and social organization. It seeks a scholarly understanding that is based on empirical research and relevant theory.
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