Social Vectors of Digital Transformation: Threats of Emerging New Discriminatory Manifestations of Digital Poverty and the Role of Sustainable Finance in Their Counter
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The article is based on the research hypothesis that the analysis of the social consequences of digitization and digitalization processes as components of digital transformations that generate new threats to economic inequality will involve a careful study of cause-and-effect relationships that will arise in specific historical circumstances and institutional conditions, and will reflect a complex of combined at the moment of interdependent events of global, regional and national importance. The purpose of the study is to generalize ideas about the impact of digitization processes on the course of digital transformations with a special emphasis on the role of digital technologies in generating a new type of inequality — digital poverty. A component of the processes of digitization, and therefore digitalization, is the process of datafication, by which we understand the activity, behavior or process, as a result of which new factors of production are formed - meaningful data as a central aspect of digitalization. In modern studies of digitization processes, technologies appear as multifaceted actors as the socio-technical patterns in which they are embedded and under the influence of which they are formed and changed. Digital changes as an intermediate stage of digital transformations exert evolutionary, and sometimes violently revolutionary (in the case of an innovative breakthrough as a manifestation of Schumpeterian creative destruction) pressure on all levels of social interaction: at the level of society as a whole; at the level of digitized society with its digital newly created virtual spaces; at the level of organizations and institutes. The question of the duration of digital transformation processes is also controversial, although the available empirical experience allows us to establish that digitalization is a process that lasts for decades, which means that it can itself be part of other transformation processes, such as such "mega-processes" as globalization, standardization, rationalization. Digitization is not always immanent in novelty and innovation, because digitization processes can arise from existing processes, or even block potential novelty in business processes, which can lead to a decrease in profitability or even the destruction of business models themselves. In this case, digitalization can be characterized by a so-called built-in stabilizer, which, in fact, blocks digital changes. This means that both new and institutionalized technologists will form new socio-technical mechanisms of interaction between various stakeholders. The analysis of the manifestations of the global problem of poverty in the conditions of digital transformations calls into question the place of "social" in society, because it forces us to admit that the governments of states, regardless of their level of development, are not able to provide the appropriate digital infrastructure for all citizens to provide social services. Conceptual differences between investors, positioned as rational, and intended beneficiaries, positioned as those hoping for interest from investors, legitimize the process of capital accumulation to contribute to the solution of digital poverty.
Source: Economic scope
Author: K. Oliinyk
Institution: Mariupol State University
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402750705