Civil Society Organizations in Knowledge Society

Abstract

The notion of a knowledge society demands equal access of knowledge for every stakeholder in the society. Modern information and communication technologies play a significant role in accessing and storing knowledge, which is a vital enabler for fostering knowledge society paradigm. Voluntary organizations represent an important part of society which differs from traditional business and governmental organizations in terms of structure, working methodologies, and decision making. In this paper the authors investigate the Pakistani civil society sector to analyze the involvement of technology in their work settings. The findings suggest that lack of technological and financial resources hinder voluntary organizations in this region to adopt innovative technological solutions, so there is need for supporting the appropriation of technology in this sector. On the basis of the authors’ findings they propose a research plan to follow for the uplift of Pakistani NGOs and their use of ICTs. This research framework can be extended to NGO sectors of other parts of the world in an effort to generalize the findings worldwide to better support the technology needs of this community.