Public institutions have recently been faced with multiple challenges arising from increased \ncompetition from the private sector and public scrutiny. To remain competitive as well as \nprofitable, some have resulted to privatization. The Kenya Tea Development Authority has faced \nserious challenges both in the internal operating and external environment which required urgent \nattention to avoid any serious impact in the local tea industry. This was made worse by global \ndevelopments in the tea industry, resulting in low returns in the entire tea value chain and the \nfarm level. KTDA therefore needed to position itself to increase its competitiveness, global \nmarket share and increase returns. The objectives of the study were to establish the approaches \nthat KTDA Ltd had used in its privatization process and also, the challenges it encountered in its \nprivatization. \nThis was a case study which sampled ten employees thus achieving a 100% response rate. Both \nprimary and secondary data were collected. Primary data was collected through face to face \ninterviews and also through self administered semi-structured questionnaires. Data was analyzed \nusing frequencies, means and standard deviations. These were presented in tabular format. \nQualitative data was analyzed using content and factor analysis. \nThe research findings revealed that various approaches implemented by KTDA towards \nachieving its privatization were not well defined to most stakeholders. It was evident that the \nneed to plan ahead, pressure from stakeholders and response to customer needs were viewed as \nthe important factors that necessitated the privatization. The objectives of the privatization \naccording to those interviewed were to increase competitiveness of KTDA Ltd and reduce costs. \nIt was evident that privatization changes were largely initiated at the top management level and \nthe privatization vision was clearly articulated, nor understood by all staff. The privatization \nprocess faced rather strong resistance from stakeholders, due to issues such as, parochial self \ninterest, fear of the unknown, fear of inability to develop relevant skills among other factors. In \nan attempt to react to these factors, training and education, communication, use of local change \nleaders, promise of reward, coercion and authority, manipulation and use of reward were the \ncommonly used mechanisms. Other factors that had hindered the privatization process were \ninterference by factories and politicians. Out of the set out objectives, interviewees agreed that \nthe privatization had enabled KTDA Ltd to operate on autonomous basis, as well as enhancing \nefficiency of the organization, while the main key successes factors present included properly \ntrained staff to manage the privatized institution and who are well equipped to drive the business. \nIt was however recommended that for an effective privatization of KTDA Ltd to take place, the \nshareholding structure of the organization and the factory companies should be restructured. The \ndual role of KTDA Ltd as a management agent and a tea grower's investment issue should be \naddressed to avoid the current confusion with a subsidiary company being formed to manage the \nfactories. The organization should further decentralize its function to the regional offices to \nenhance service delivery to the various factories. Implementation of proper management of the \nhuman capital and good corporate governance policies are paramount factors for streamlining the \nprivatization process of KTDA Ltd.
There is general consensus that coordination and integration are needed to achieve efficient outcomes while distributed decision power and autonomous actions are essential to develop innovative responses. These dual requirements for operational optimization and ongoing business innovation capture the essence of organizational ambidexterity as the means to sustain performance over time when environmental conditions change. This paper incorporates strategic management and organization theoretical rationales in a model that combines elements of integration and experimentation in the strategy making process and thereby extends the evolving literature on the ambidextrous organization. The performance relationships of the ambidextrous integrative strategy making model are investigated on the basis of a cross-sectional sample of 185 business entities operating in different manufacturing industries. Results of structural equation analyses indicate that superior performance in the ambidextrous organizations is associated with efficiencies derived from adherence to centralized strategic planning and effectiveness generated by decentralized innovative behavior through participation and autonomous actions. The study enhances our understanding of ambidexterity as the result of combined strategy making processes that balance the needs for economic efficiency and organizational adaptability.
The weakness of traditional financial management is obvious increasingly in network economy,such as management means backward comparatively,budget control system imperfect,capital control ineffective,which will restrict the optimization of resource allocation.Correspondingly,network technique provides guarantee for business groups to establish centralized management model in finance.i.e.business groups can adapt to the requirement of network economic development and realize the reform,innovation and maximum of total profit via transferring the model of financial management from decentralized to centralized,strengthening the functions of supervising agency,centralized management of capital and limitation of right to financial personnel.
The literature on knowledge sharing is extensive but organization design received little attention in this literature. A few useful exceptions are Birkinshaw e.a. (2002), Hansen (2002) and Tsai (2002). However, these attempts are yet too limited to fully understand the relationship between organization design choices and knowledge sharing. To contribute in filling this gap, we look at the fundamental organization design dimensions, specialization centralization, formalization, and coordination, in their relationship to the concepts of knowledge and knowledge sharing. While specialization creates firm-specific boundaries to knowledge sharing, coordination is the firm-specific mechanism to overcome these boundaries (Grant, 1996). A multiple case study approach was followed to collect our data, using a questionnaire in the Belgian divisions of two European companies active in the energy and finance sector. Based on a reassessment of the classic organization design literature, we assumed more inter-unit knowledge sharing when: decentralized and informal coordination is used, interdependency between units is low and specialization, reflected in knowledge complexity and unit differences, is low. Our findings indicated that interdependency and
Torsten Eymann, Stefan Sackmann, GĂźnter MĂźller, Ingo Pippow
The mobile and increasingly ubiquitous use of information technology leads to more dynamic, constantly self-reconfiguring networks. Their services are available anytime and anywhere; as software agents, they can make local, context-aware decisions. F. A. von Hayek developed a theory for economic coordination based on individual decision making. This paper presents the explanation concepts of economic self-organization as at least one option for the design of decentralized coordination of information systems consisting of autonomous software agents with limited information processing capacity and incomplete information. Experiments using a multi-agent system show that a targeted change of this basic rule set directly influences the behavior of the individual elements and indirectly the behavior of the overall system.
Although economical and technological progress has made societies more prosperous, it has also created drawbacks such as poverty and unemployment, and not every member of these societies is happy. The dissatisfaction has led to questions and the re-examination of the top-down approach of central government for planning and management. Recently a new type of society has been postulated, in which the happiness of the individual has importance as well as the prosperity of the group. This new trend will come about through a structural change in society itself. Such a restructuring will be accelerated by information technologies, including the Internet/Intranet, which have been rapidly advancing. Global communication networks enable global communication among individuals and eliminate traditional borderlines around organizations and countries; that is, information sent by each individual flows all over the world and an individual can choose the information he/she needs. The name for the above new trend in the structural change of society is "Autonomous Decentralization" and the author believes that the Autonomous Decentralized System (ADS) (K. Mori et al., 1986) will become quite a common technology in every section or every level of society, such as companies, industries, and public organizations. The paper describes the effectiveness of applying ADS technologies to the structure of our new society and indicates the future trend of ADS technologies.
This study examines organizational structural changes within the finance and accounting function following the adoption of new information system. Many accounting researchers have predicted changing environment and role for management accountants resulting from competition, regulation, and manufacturing and information technology (see Baker, 1992; Cooper, 1996; Cox, 1992; Drucker, 1990; Elliott, 1992; Epstein, 1993; Ezzamel, 1994; Flamholtz, 1992; Johnson and Kaplan, 1987; Kaplan, 1984, 1986; King et al., 1991; Madden and Holmes, 1991; McNair, 1996; Siegel et al., 1997; Shea and Kleinsorge, 1994; Spicer, 1992; Tyson, 1996; Weaving, 1995). Disagreement exists regarding the nature of the changes, and whether is actually taking place. Cooper (1996) foresees an increased need for management accounting, but decreased need for management accountants. He predicts the management accounting function will be decentralized to those on the shop floor. After new management accounting systems are in place, m uch of the day-to-day management accounting can be transferred to the workforce (Cooper, 1996: 36). Elliott (1992) also predicts an increased reliance on blue-collar workers as they become knowledge-workers, and part of the aggregate brainpower of the organization; they are supposed to help figure out how to improve quality, speed production, and contribute to customer satisfaction. The management accounting department may adopt supportive and monitoring role rather than more proactive decision-making role, as advocated by Kaplan (1995) and Boer (1995), among others. study of the evolving role of management accountants, King et al. (1991) report that a sea of change is taking place as management accountants become more proactive in the decision-making process. McNair (1996) disagrees with the premise that management accounting has become more relevant. In general, we see desire for change, but little evidence that management accounting has had the courage to let go of its ties to financial accounting and external reporting requirements (McNair, 1996: 40). According to McNair, there has been much discussion about changed emphasis in management accounting, but she describes the changes as old wine in new bottles. Since the early 1980s, numerous research projects have been conducted to gain better understanding of the management accounting function in organizations (Keating, 1995) and to develop theoretical basis for management accounting research in the future (Kaplan, 1986). This article seeks to add to that literature by identifying changes taking place in accounting functions as hypothesized by set of literature-based expectations. The most significant finding of the study is support for flattening the organizational hierarchy and developing networked organization within the accounting function. The levels of management within the accounting function at one site were reduced from four to two over the course of five years; accountants began reporting to supervisors located at sites worldwide. At the second site, shared services activities were centralized at one location for the North American continent. The centralization resulted in reduction of accounting function costs from 1.7 percent of sales to 1 percent of sales. Our study reveals that accountants became less involved in many routine tasks of cost accounting and began providing support role both to plant personnel and to business managers in making strategic decisions. The remainder of the article is divided into four sections. The next section develops three research propositions for fieldwork, based on review of the accounting, information technology (IT), and organizational literature. Then we consider research design issues including site selection, field research, and data sources. After this we present the field research findings in relation to our research propositions. The final section discusses conclusions, limitations, and opportunities for future research. âŚ
Ellen M. Hufnagel, Jacob G. Birnberg, Joseph M. Katz
Problems can arise in decentralized organizations when usage-based chargeback systems are implemented to control computing resources. A case study of a company that is changing from negotiated pricing to full cost pricing illustrates the fact that concerns about fairness can arise not only with respect to specific characteristics of the chargeback system (e.g., understandability, controllability), but also as a result of central management policies governing internal transactions between the users and MIS. In particular, this examination identifies three factors that affect the fairness perceptions of autonomous divisional managers: (1) a high degree of interdependence between user divisions and MIS such that the behavior of MIS could have a significant impact on divisional performance; (2) restrictions on divisional managersâ freedom to purchase computer services from external sources; and (3) the tendency for full cost to exceed market prices early in the life of a data center. A dual pricing approach may be an interim solution to reduce conflict and improve user perceptions of fairness.
The literature on the deomposition of mathematical programs as models for organizational design and resource allocation in decentralized organizations is extensive. Although models differ in detail, all conceptualize the allocation problem as a multi-level managerial coordination procedure, involving local (divisional) and global (organization-wide) resources, in which informational automony is to be maintained. That is, coordination of resource usage by relatively autonomous divisions is to be effected in these models without any one agent in the organization accumulating complete knowledge of the technical resource transformations, payoff or cost coefficients and detailed plans that divisions utilize in converting resources to useful ends. Unfortunately there has been little empirical investigation into the implementational problems of applying these models in decentralized organizations. This study reports on an experiment with human subjects as decision makers in a simulated decentralized organization. The formulation of the overall resource-allocation problem as a linear program permitted two forms of coordination: price-directive in which transfer pricing is used to allocate resources, and resource-directive in which a rationing or budgeting approach is used. Both schemes can be shown to solve the overall organizational problem but impose different information, communication, and decision-making structures upon the subject managers. The experiment was designed to examine comparative managerial performance by the subjects, as central coordinating agents, under the alternative transfer pricing and budgeting schemes. Within each of these schemes two levels of decision time pressure were also introduced to examine its impact upon subject performance. The purpose of the investigation was to study the influence of organizational design (allocation scheme) and situational factors (time pressure) upon human decision-making under carefully controlled experimental conditions. The experimental setting was that of a decentralized university incorporating three subordinate college divisions and one coordinating agent, the president's office. The colleges were modeled as linear programs and the coordination function was assigned to the experimental subjects. In the price-directive scheme a subject assigned a transfer price to each of two global resources in each planning iteration. In the resource-directive scheme a subject directly allocated amounts of the two global resources to each of the colleges in each planning iteration. Consistent with decomposition theory, feedback to the subject in the form of aggregate resource demands (price-direction) or individual bids for higher resource allocations (resource-direction) was given to initiate a new planning iteration. The budgetary goal utilized by subjects was to maximize net dollar contribution from colleges to the university under prespecified quality-of-education constraints. After several planning iterations each subject finalized the resource allocations, terminating the experiment. The hypotheses were that resource-directive subjects would outperform price-directive subjects, that high decision time pressure would exacerbate decision making and that subjects would outperform decomposition algorithms in early iterations. Data from the experiment did not support the first two hypotheses; the third was confirmed. Aside from concluding that strategic factors (organizational design) and tactical factors (time pressure) strongly influence decision making behavior, several specific implications can be tentatively drawn. In similar settings transfer pricing schemes may be preferable to traditional budgeting schemes for planning resource allocations. Furthermore, the potential exists for profitable use of man-machine procedures for resource allocation involving decision support technology in the form of decomposition models to augment human decision heuristics. Finally, experimental methods offer a vehicle for addressing human factors and implementational considerations missing from current analytic models.
B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan ¡ 5 authors
The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979â1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles âcreated to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).â1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the filmâdirected by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Womenâs Film Project collective and described as âthe first Latin American feminist documentaryââexamines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the filmâs production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Dayâs institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as developmentâs âregimes of visuality.â5 Especially relevant to The Double Dayâs production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nationsâ proclamation of 1975 as International Womenâs Year, WID emphasized womenâs participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Womenâs Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970sâas best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of âunderdevelopmentâ that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered âdevelopment mediaââexemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such mediaâs production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how âgender impacts [these worksâ] shape, content, and trajectories.â9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as âdevelopment mediaâ is to overlook the filmâs place within Solbergâs directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational womenâs filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth centuryâsometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase womenâs contributions but also presumes a âweakâ or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about âdevelopment mediaâ as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this filmâs radical Marxist approach to womenâs labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the filmâs protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its makingâfrom the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated itârevealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the filmâs Latin American contextâreflected in Solbergâs formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico Cityârequires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the filmâs history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalismâs political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed âthe practice of informed speculation.â18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to âpress at the limitsâ of the archive to âinoculate our scholarship against our evidenceâs afflictions.â19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive âin a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.â20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and âintimate familiarity with the archiveâ that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projectsâand their preservationâover time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of womenâs movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of developmentâeach historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these filmsâ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issueâs own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordancesâsuch as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platformsâwe have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge productionâand this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a âpowerful but fragile semantic constellation,â as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while âan area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.â22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond âmodernityâ as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and mediaâs entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to developmentâs epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also womenâs in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how developmentâs has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about womenâs urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of womenâs and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This âgender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the womenâs development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of womenâs presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a