ENTRENAMIENTO Desarrollo del Personal

Interpretation of cues leads to a response. The range of responses to IT-related cues might be as wide (or narrow) as the actor can construct, including but not limited to the

acquisition or rejection of a new piece of IT. In this section I discuss various responses suggested in the examined literature which are relevant to the IT encountering

perspective. The Carnegie School essentially considers a binary set of responses: performance outcomes interpreted as within or above aspiration levels are encoded as successes and they will tend to be met with routinized responses or inertia, whereas performance outcomes interpreted as below aspiration levels are encoded as failures and they will trigger search for new forms of action (Cyert and March 1963; Levitt and March 1988; March and Simon 1958). Search, however, mustn’t be interpreted in the neo-

classical optimizing sense (Stigler 1961), but rather in the cognitively-bounded and satisficing version that this very school has put forward (March and Simon 1958). This means that individuals will assume simple concepts of causality based on previous experiences, and will tend to stay within the neighborhood of known alternatives, settling for a response that seems good enough for addressing the situation at hand. This clearly raises a concern regarding whether typical small business owners, without some outside assistance, will generally be able to find their way around the convoluted IT marketplace I described in previous chapters.

This binary set of responses has been qualified in at least two ways. First, it is recognized that even when outcomes are encoded as failures, search is not the only response

possible. Alternatively, individuals might lower their aspiration levels so that the attained outcome meets their adjusted expectations (i.e., the failure is no longer framed as such), or they might decrease organizational slack, thereby reducing or halting their search efforts (Cyert and March 1963; Levinthal and March 1993). Second, there is the thorny problem of stubbornly ambiguous outcomes, which are those that do not fit comfortably

as successes or failures, either because the situation in itself is ambiguous (e.g., near misses) or because the observer lacks frameworks of reference with which to interpret it (Levinthal and Rerup 2006; Rerup 2009). To understand responses to such outcomes, scholars have recently started to add insights from the sensemaking and mindfulness perspectives (e.g., Christianson et al. 2009; Rerup 2009); these approaches to responses will be summarized below.

Sensemaking is about action, so interpreting and responding can only be distinguished from each other analytically. In practice, individuals who are interpreting a situation are at the same time trying out responses and making sense of them, and this action only stops when a response seems to work and a plausible interpretation of it is retained for future use (Weick 1979; Weick 1995). In this way, experimenting can be present in IT encounters and it might lead to IT adoption, but it does not presuppose adoption, it just means that decision makers will dip their toes in the water before committing to a course of action.

Work on mindfulness applied to diffusion of innovations (Fiol and O'Connor 2003; Swanson and Ramiller 2004) has advanced the idea that mindful potential adopters, by paying careful attention to their own circumstances as opposed to absorbing superficial interpretations grounded on broad institutional claims, may halt action that is deemed risky or unnecessary. This alternative view has important implications regarding responses to environmental stimuli, insomuch as actors may respond by adopting the innovation in some cases, by deferring adoption if they believe their organization is not ready for it, or by rejecting the innovation if they believe there is a poor fit between the innovation and their organizational context (Swanson and Ramiller 2004). Further, given

that mindfulness is manifested by a preoccupation with failure (Weick et al. 1999), mindful organizations will be prudent and defer or reject an action if signs in their own context indicate that they might fail (Swanson and Ramiller 2004). By contrast, a mindless state might lead to a mimetic response, hence the adoption of fashionable technologies (Swanson and Ramiller 2004), or to the non-adoption of a technology that would be useful but is missed or discarded by the potential adopter.

Both the sensemaking and the mindfulness perspectives are linked to the idea of

resilience by improvisation (Weick 1993; Weick et al. 1999). Faced with ambiguous or novel situations, and sensitive to context particularities, individuals or organizations may be able to use the open space afforded by their background knowledge and accumulated hands-on experience to develop creative responses by recombining known elements in new ways. Therefore, the repertoire of responses of an organization may be as wide as its knowledge inputs allow (Weick 1993). To emphasize this idea, Weick has often gone back to the systems theory law of requisite variety, which states that for a system to be viable, the variation it may display for coping with external variety must be greater than the variation found in the environment (Ashby 1956).

In their IT encounters, small business owners can attempt a diverse set of responses, as varied (or limited) as they can construct, and contingent on the importance attached to the issue at hand. These responses include but are not limited to adopting IT. Business

owners facing situations construed as failures, and deemed important for business survival and success, might search for a satisficing IT alternative. Arguably, search behaviours will be affected by the owner and their staff understanding of market alternatives, and these behaviours will tend to be ad-hoc, since search capabilities may

not be systematized into repeatable processes. Small business owners might also try to experiment at a low cost and reach out to social ties for advice, in order to enhance their knowledge of possible courses of action. Yet, in light of their resource constraints, their decision making autonomy, and the intertwining of personal and business considerations, business owners might try to safeguard limited resources from unnecessary, excessive or potentially unfruitful consumption, by lowering their performance expectations in the face of adversity, thereby deferring both search and potential adoption, or by crafting non resource-intensive solutions.

Theoretically contrasting situations may lead to different responses. More specifically, situations which are not viewed as failures, or which are not construed as affecting business survival and success might be met with inertia. Small scope IT changes, which are not expected to utilize large amounts of resources, hence not seen as risky from a resource consumption perspective, might be undertaken more readily, under a rationale akin to mimetic isomorphism.

Importantly, the theoretical synthesis I present above makes it possible to view deferring and rejecting adoption as potentially sensible responses if small business owners, aware of their own circumstances, perceive the move towards adoption as premature,

unnecessarily risky or costly, or simply not needed for their business. The notion of mindfulness in particular opens up the possibility of seeing non-adopters and late adopters in a more positive light, as thoughtful or cautious actors. This interpretation is radically distinct from conventional innovation literature, regularly affected by the pro- innovation bias, as discussed in Chapter Two.

At this point, two qualifications are in order. First, it has not been my intention to use the literature to predict in any precise way patterns of attention, interpretation and responses among small businesses, I have only sought to describe how these literature streams illuminate the IT encountering perspective. Put differently, I have intended to use these theoretical ideas in a way that is consistent with what Gregor (2006) calls “theories for explaining”, Klein and Myers (1999) refer to as “sensitizing devices”, and DiMaggio (1995) refers to as the defamiliarizing purpose of theory. That is, the primary concern has been to use theories for developing alternative explanations about why and how

phenomena occur, rather than making testable predictions about the future. This remark shall set the record straight if my imprecise use of the language suggests prediction as central theme in my discussion.

Second, in no way does my discussion aim to suggest scholars shift gears and start seeing non-adoption as a necessarily desirable state of affairs for small businesses. It seems clear to me that non-adoption, seen from this theoretical standpoint, can sometimes be a

maladaptive response. That would be the case, for example, when problems are not being addressed but swept under the carpet (Weick et al. 2005). My point, instead, is that these perspectives add fairly specific theoretical tools to observe non-adoption responses in either a positive or a negative light, thereby making it possible for the researcher to hold a more balanced a priori stance towards adoption. In other words, any judgements about the appropriateness of adoption or non-adoption responses will need to wait until the specificities of the context are accounted for. I believe such a possibility is not clearly open in conventional IT adoption frameworks.