Crafting Moral Infrastructures: How Nonprofits Use Facebook to Survive
This addresses how non-profits navigate technology adoption, offering insights for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on prior critical research without major new methods.
The study investigated how non-profit organizations use information and communication technologies like Facebook for civic engagement, finding that they create infrastructures based on moral frameworks rather than utility, challenging existing theories of technology choice.
We present findings from interviews with 23 individuals affiliated with non-profit organizations (NPOs) to understand how they deploy information and communication technologies (ICTs) in civic engagement efforts. Existing research about NPO ICT use is largely critical, but we did not find evidence that NPOs fail to use tools effectively. Rather, we detail how various ICT use on the part of NPOs intersects with unique affordance perceptions and adoption causes. Overall, we find that existing theories about technology choice (e.g., task-technology fit, uses and gratifications) do not explain the assemblages NPOs describe. We argue that NPOs fashion infrastructures in accordance with their moral economy frameworks rather than selecting tools based on utility. Together, the rhetorics of infrastructure and moral economies capture the motivations and constraints our participants expressed and challenge how prevailing theories of ICT usage describe the non-profit landscape.