Accommodating Practices During Episodes of Disillusionment with Mobile IT (original) (raw)
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Information Systems Journal, 2020
This study investigates the observed behavioural outcomes when users experience negative disconfirmation with consumerised IT artefacts with the aim to identify the generative mechanisms of these outcomes. We analyse blogposts, authored and published by tablet users, where they narrate their experience with an IT artefact. We employ grounded theory method techniques, and through the lens of critical realism and the application of abduction and retroduction, we identify three user accommodating practices following negative disconfirmation, namely discontinuance behaviour, workarounds and reframing, and two generative mechanisms with enduring properties and causal power over them: solution identification and cost/benefits assessment. Our work contributes to the literature of volitional IT use and the consumerisation of IT, by uncovering the mechanisms that pave the way towards observed user behaviours.
Appropriating Information Technology Artefacts through Trial and Error: The Case of the Tablet
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The concept of appropriation is of paramount importance for the lasting use of an Information Technology (IT) artefact following its initial adoption, and therefore its success. However, quite often, users' original expectations are negatively disconfirmed, and instead of appropriating the IT artefact, they discontinue its use. In this study we examine the use of IT artefacts following negative disconfirmation and use Grounded Theory Method techniques to analyse 136 blogposts, collected between March 2011-July 2017, to investigate how users appropriate or reject the tablet when technology falls short of users' expectations. Our findings show that users overcome negative disconfirmation through a trial and error process. In doing so, we identify that users appropriate the tablet when the attained benefits significantly outweigh the risks or sacrifices stemming out of its use. We discuss our contribution within the context of the appropriation literature, and highlight that the success of IT lies with the user's success in identifying personal use scenarios within and across diverse contexts of use.
Coping with Information Technology: Mixed Emotions, Vacillation, and Nonconforming Use Patterns
Management Information Systems Quarterly, 2015
Achieving the promised business benefits of an IT system is intimately tied to the continued incorporation of the system into the work practices it is intended to support. While much is known about different social, cognitive, and technical factors that influence initial adoption and use, less is known about the role of emotional factors in users' behaviors. Through an in-depth field study conducted in two North American universities, we examine the role of emotions in how specific IT use patterns emerge. We find that there are five different characteristics of an IT stimulus event (cues) that, when interacting in a reinforcing manner, elicit a single class of emotions (uniform affective responses) and, when interacting in an oppositional manner, elicit mixed emotions (ambivalent affective responses). While users respond to uniform emotions with clear adaptation strategies, they deal with ambivalent emotions by combining different adaptation behaviors, a vacillating strategy between emphasizing positive and negative aspects of the stimulus. Surprisingly, these ambivalent emotions and vacillating strategies can lead to active and positive user engagement, exhibited in task and tool adaptation behaviors and improvisational use patterns that, despite their nonconformity to terms of use, can have positive organizational implications.
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2008
Recent papers have debated whether there are any additional insights still to be gained from traditional information systems (IS) adoption models. Independently, recent research has paid attention to the "usage" construct and offered taxonomies of IS use. In this paper, we offer an overview of a theoretical model that offers researchers the ability to study individual users' interaction with information technology (IT) artifacts, as well repeated interactions overtime. The proposed interaction-centric model highlights how the characteristics of an IT artifact, together with the user's internal system and other structuring factors, affect users' choices in terms of how to utilize the artifact. This subsequently, affects the types of beliefs users form about the artifact as well as their evaluations of it. Furthermore, we introduce a new set of constructs that capture users' overall perceptions of the artifact and the relationship with it. To facilitate the study of this dynamic relationship that develops between the user and the artifact, we further explicate the effects of evaluations of the artifact from past interaction, and evaluations of the relationship with it, on how users choose to utilize the artifact in future interactions. Looking Beyond Adoption to Understanding the User-IT Artifact Relationship
Understanding the Hidden Dissatisfaction of Users toward End-User Computing
Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 2000
The objective of this research is to examine satisfied and dissatisfied end-users in an organization to determine if they hold different technological frames of reference towards end-user computing (EUC). This research examines the effectiveness of the computer systems at the organization, while at the same time measuring the level of end-user satisfaction with the EUC environment. Grounded theory techniques for qualitative analysis of interviews were used to assess the technological frames of reference of selected highly satisfied and highly dissatisfied users. While analysis of the satisfaction surveys alone indicated that the user population was generally satisfied with their EUC environment, follow-up interviews and service quality gap analysis highlighted several individual support areas that required remedial action. In addition, satisfied and dissatisfied users held different views or technological frames of reference towards the technology they used. Their frames of reference affected their expectations of the technology, their interactions with the MIS support staff, and their utilization of the technology on a day-today basis.
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Despite evidence that contradictions shape use of mobile devices, there are currently no dialectical analyses of such usage behavior. We identify the contradictions between exploration and exploitation behaviors, between individual and social orientation, and between hedonic and utilitarian usage and posit that these play a key role in shaping mobile device assimilation. Drawing on these contradictions, we present a dialectical analysis of how a group of fifteen iPhone users assimilated mobile services over a period of seven months. In doing so, we draw on data about the antecedent conditions at the time of iPhone adoption, about interactions within the group and its wider social network, and about how individual usage patterns developed. Based on the analysis, we describe and explain how the iPhone was assimilated into the group and offer new insights into the forces that shape mobile device assimilation.
Mandatory Technology in Use: a Study of Users’ Appropriation Practices
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This paper analyzes users' practices when they deal with mandatory IT artifacts, many times adjusting them to their own interests. The case study investigates the pattern of adaptations implemented by lecturers (the users) while using an academic portal (the IT artifact) in a university (the mandatory organizational setting). This object was chosen, because different interpretations of the artifact's flexible features allow for the existence of several distinctive patterns of use and adaptation behaviors among system users that were identified and analyzed. As a result, we depict a set of moves by means of which users either complied with the system 'as-is', refuted parts of it while adhering to others, adapted it, replaced components or complemented it, becoming co-developers of their own 'systems in use'. The study was carried out in Brazil and results may reflect the local culture of challenging what is imposed and trying to shift things according to one's own understanding of what is right, but we believe the generated model could help understanding also what happens in organizations in other Latin American countries and around the world, at least in situations where users are more empowered or more proactive, regardless of the reasons for such behaviors.