TEORIAS BASADAS EN CONTINGENCIAS O SITUACIONES

Current conceptualizations of what happens before a certain piece of IT arrives at a small business put forward by the literature on IT choice suffer from some serious inadequacies which can be partly attributed to the aforementioned blind spots. I will discuss three particularly relevant conceptual weaknesses: the pro-innovation bias, the notable absence

of search from existing theories of IT choice, and the unexplained gaps between competing explanations of IT choice.

First, earlier research on IT adoption in particular has proceeded from IT towards the business. An underlying side effect of this directionality has been that non-adoption responses are deemed undesirable, and non-adopters are denounced as laggards. Rogers describes this feature of research as the pro-innovation bias, and states that this is a problem ‘in an intellectual sense’ (2003, p. 107), because it leads researchers to

understudy certain aspects of diffusion processes, such as lack of awareness, rejection, or discontinuance, and thus results in a failure to understand diffusion more fully. Fichman (2004) adds that the pro-innovation bias also makes it harder for researchers to recognize differences in quality across various innovations.

If one inverts this directionality and goes from the business towards IT, one might find that adoption does not always constitute a sensible response to IT-related stimuli. Indeed, decision makers themselves may not gauge how appropriate a response is on the basis of whether or not IT is adopted, how much of it, or how fast, but on the basis of how well this response, with or without novel IT, appears to make sense for the individual

(Harwood 2011; Swanson and Ramiller 2004; Weick 1979). The pro-innovation bias, or in other words the disciplinary tendency to believe that adoption responses are the right responses, is the reason why I argue that previous research has been more responsive to the needs of the entrepreneurial communities diffusing IT innovations than to the needs of organizations, small businesses in particular. While the former benefits from IT diffusion almost certainly, the latter might have good reasons to respond to IT-related stimuli in ways other than IT. I further sustain that until the directionality of research is

inverted so as to start from the business and not from IT, our conceptualizations will be hampered and will remain inadequate to meet the needs of potential adopters.

Second, search is conspicuously absent from our conceptualizations of the processes leading to IT choice. As discussed earlier, search of IT alternatives has been touched upon only in a few IS studies, but has not been the core focus of any of them, let alone specifically theorized upon. The fact that historically there were relatively few

alternatives to choose from helps explain why search, or put more broadly, the

identification of suitable courses of action, was largely left out of theories of IT choice. But the IT marketplace has come a long way since those early days, and diversity of alternatives lies at the core of it today. Indeed, several researchers have started to shed light into the nature and industry effects of specific portions of this diversity, such as the shift to services and cloud-based deployment models (Cusumano 2008; Cusumano 2010), the variety of licensing types (Economides and Katsamakas 2006; Sen 2007), the

fragmented and crowded state of some market segments, such as enterprise systems (Chellappa et al. 2010; Fink and Markovich 2008), and the globalization of IT provision (Arora and Forman 2007; Gefen and Carmel 2008). The complexity and dynamism of the IT marketplace create a paradox for organizations: while these characteristics might open up new opportunities for organizations around technology, they might also result in situations where suitable alternatives are not known ex-ante to decision makers. This paradox is further aggravated in resource-constrained organizations, with pressing needs and fewer time, money and knowledge resources. We thus lack theoretical explanations as to how organizations search for appropriate IT needles in the IT marketplace haystack,

if at all. Without a solid understanding of search, we are severely underestimating the span and complexity of IT choice phenomena.

I now come to the third way in which current conceptualizations are insufficient. Several competing accounts exist of the rationale behind IT choice, all of them duly accompanied by empirical support, from seeing individuals as rational decision makers adopting or selecting IT alternatives on the basis of expected instrumental gains, to portraying individuals as making such choices mostly on the basis of social considerations, such as legitimacy pressures or organizational politics. Explanations regarding why or how such disparate explanations coexist are rather limited. The argument suggesting that early adopters make choices based on instrumental rationality, whereas the choices of late adopters are driven by institutional legitimacy has been called into question, mainly because it downplays the institutional work carried out by various interested parties from the beginning of the innovation’s diffusion journey (Swanson and Ramiller 1997), and fails to explain the choices occurring “in the middle” between early and late adopters (Wang 2010). Further, with few notable exceptions (Jeyaraj and Sabherwal 2008; Pollock and Williams 2007; Tingling and Parent 2004), the coexistence of such starkly different logics in the real world has not been a specific area of concern for IT choice research, and the gap between rational and socially-embedded views does nothing to help us move our understanding beyond its current state. This situation seems somewhat similar to the one Stephen Barley might have found himself in about 30 years ago, when he encountered drastically opposing views about the relationship between technology and structure, and very little progress in the way of theoretically reconciling these views. He concluded that a new perspective was needed:

Rather than continue to scrutinize research (…), a more fruitful plot may be simply to embrace the contradictory evidence as a replicated finding. One could then seek alternate theoretical frameworks that would explain technology’s link to structure while treating inconsistent outcomes as a matter of course (Barley 1986 p. 78)

Similarly, I think that the field has now enough accumulated evidence suggesting that both instrumental rationality and social embeddedness have important roles to play in the process leading to IT choice, and that more research efforts aiming at bridging the gap between these two perspectives are needed if we are to continue advancing our

knowledge.

Actions can be taken to fill this gap, increase our understanding of the search processes preceding IT innovation, and correct the innovation bias. The result will be stronger theory. Actions must include the development of theoretical foundations that address the blind spots head-on, and the crafting of empirical strategies that explore what is actually happening at organizations as they notice IT, interpret it as relevant, and develop suitable courses of action to adopt a specific instance, in whichever order that might happen or fail to happen.

At this point, a clarification is in order. I do not intend to argue that IS researchers do not have any theoretical tools to explain how attention, interpretation and responses to IT take place. What I suggest, however, is that extant works are scarce, scattered across several places, have not built a distinguishable domain of enquiry, but have fused into more recognizable domains of enquiry (i.e., IT adoption, diffusion of IT innovations, IT selection and evaluation), and have not looked at these specific aspects of the

There is no single path to undertake the actions that are needed to produce stronger theory. The name I gave to the path that I followed is IT encountering. IT encountering can provide an overarching framework within which more research efforts connected to this area can gather together. In the next three chapters, I introduce this path. Chapter Three presents the theoretical foundations used to build this perspective, Chapter Four offers a conceptualization of small businesses that serves the purpose of developing situated theory on IT encountering, and Chapter Five explains the empirical strategy I considered suitable to the task. The results of following this path (i.e., the study findings), are presented in Chapter Six.

Chapter 3

Theoretical Foundations

This chapter defines IT encounters and presents the theoretical foundations I used to form a basic understanding of the three sub-processes contained within an IT encounter:

interpretation, attention and responses. These three sub-processes, as theoretically described in this chapter, were used to inform data analysis (i.e., they were used in the coding process as categories) and they were preserved, with some adjustments, in the process model of IT encountering that contains the study findings.

I define an IT encounter as any situation whereby a decision maker pays attention to cues leading them to notice or consider the possibility of adding a certain piece of new IT to their business, interprets these cues, and then responds to them in a way which might or might not include the acquisition of new IT. I see IT encounters as experiences

individuals are faced with in the course of their everyday activities, and thus I see each IT encounter as an instantiation of a larger and ongoing repertoire of episodic experiences through which, purposefully or not, these individuals create and update their knowledge base, which then they use to inform responses to new IT encounters. Through an IT encountering perspective, I seek to explore the dynamics of IT encounters as experienced by small business owners.

As defined here, IT encountering encompasses three interrelated sub-processes, each of which has been considerably studied in the scholarly literature outside the IS field: attending to cues, interpreting those cues, and responding to them. Below, I elaborate on these three processes, drawing on theoretical insights coming from – or building upon –

the Carnegie School (Cyert and March 1963; March and Simon 1958; Simon 1947), the literature on organizing and sensemaking (Weick 1979; Weick 1995) and the literature on mindfulness (Weick et al. 1999). In what follows, I present each sub-process in separate subsections, and within each subsection I introduce insights from these three literatures in blocks arranged sequentially, followed by a synthesis whereby the introduced ideas are used to explore the small business context. This presentation structure was conceived in the sole interest of clarity. I acknowledge that empirically these processes occur

simultaneously and can be difficult to disentangle, conceptually there are some overlaps between them, and theoretically these three literature streams have informed one another considerably more than my exposition will reveal.

I also recognize that other theoretical perspectives, such as Kolb’s experiential model of learning (1984) to name one, could fruitfully enrich our understanding of IT

encountering. However, this research and the IT encountering perspective emerging from it are primarily shaped by the theoretical choices I have mentioned above.