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Why adoption and use behavior of IT/IS cannot last?—two studies in China

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Abstract

It is often observed in China that the user acceptance of a new information technology starts satisfactorily well when it is strongly promoted or even enforced to be used, but declines sharply after the initial stage. Based on an extended model derived from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this paper presents two studies in academic and governmental contexts respectively to analyze such phenomena from a post-adoption perspective. Results from structured equation model (SEM) analyses demonstrate the ability of the model to interpret the IT acceptance behavior of Chinese users both during and after the initial stage. It is then inferred that the initial rise of user acceptance is usually driven by mandatory instructions due to the managerial characteristics of long power distance in Chinese organizations, while the drop in the second period is caused by changes that occur in some of the recognition factors in the model, which may reflect the lack of fit between technology and work style. In the two specific cases studied in the paper, the lack of compatibility and facilitating conditions made the user acceptance decline after the initial period when the effects of training and mandatory instructions faded away.

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  1. http://www.industry.ccid.com.

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Acknowledgements

The work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (70972029/70890081/70621061/70831003), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (20080440030/201003094), the Research Center for Contemporary Management, and the E-Government Lab of Tsinghua University. The authors would like to thank Professor Wayne Wei Huang from Ohio University, for his valuable comments on the draft of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Nan Zhang

  2. School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Xunhua Guo & Guoqing Chen

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  1. Nan Zhang
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  2. Xunhua Guo
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Correspondence to Xunhua Guo.

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Zhang, N., Guo, X. & Chen, G. Why adoption and use behavior of IT/IS cannot last?—two studies in China. Inf Syst Front 13, 381–395 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-010-9288-3

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