ABSTRACT
Abstract: Cultural and globalization issues are known to affect the organizational use of information technology (IT). In particular, studies have indicated that a variety of cultural and globalization factors affect the organizational adoption and diffusion of IT. Among sociocultural factors, the differing effects of gender, social norms, beliefs and values, technological acculturation, and degree of technological advancement have all been shown to impact the transfer and use of technology in organizations. Globalization issues also have ramifications with respect to differences in government policy, environmental factors, structural language features, and national economic and IT policies. We sample from the voluminous published literature that reports on cultural and global factors that impact the organizational use of IT. Organizational impacts examined include technology transfer, IT use, adoption and diffusion, systems development, the creation and evolution of standards, and employment practices. Field studies include IT applications in Switzerland, Japan, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the Sudan, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and France, as well as other countries, largely as compared with the United States. Some of the specific IT applications examined include the Internet, e-mail, fax, electronic communications media, personal computing, electronic data interchange (EDI) standards, and systems development methods and approaches. Implications for relevant theory and practice are discussed, as are suggestions for future research directions in this domain. Keywords: Cultural Impacts of Technology, Globalization Issues, Organizational Adoption of IT, Use of IT
INTRODUCTION
Factors and issues that affect the organizational adoption, diffusion, and use of information technology (IT) have been widely studied for the past three decades. However, in the 1970s and 1980s these studies were largely based in North America, particularly in the United States. With the advent of organizational globalization and an increased number of transnational firms using IT in non-Western cultures, researchers have increasingly focused on sociocultural issues and factors that were heretofore overlooked in this domain. Specifically, an increasing number of studies published since 1995 have examined cultural issues affecting the organizational adoption and use of
IT in countries in Europe, in the Middle East, and in the Far East. A number of these studies have also focused on developing and lesser developed countries and cultures.
