End-user perspectives on the Adoption of Wireless Applications: Price of Convenience and a Model for Contextual Analysis

Information services delivered via wireless, portable communication devices continue to pervade our work and leisure spaces. While people are continuously bombarded with promises of newer and better ways to maintain contact with others and to have constant access to information, however, there remain a number of open issues that inhibit the potential for an open information society. The bidirectional influence between such wireless technologies and applications and their potential end-users, contributes to the development of both the technologies and applications and the social setting in which they are embedded. In this paper, we extend current studies of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) uptake by integrating interpretations of “ubiquitous computing” and its pervasion of everyday life. We draw upon findings from a range of IS research to structure our future studies of adoption issues in relation to a variety of wireless application cases. We show that, while some “traditional” IS/IT dimensions of uptake still hold, there are now a variety of other “non- utilitarian (hedonic)” factors that developers and designers need to take into account. We conclude by proposing a research model – expanded from model of user acceptability and product uptake, a descriptive framework based on the “Price of Convenience”(Ng-Kruelle, Swatman, Rebne and Hampe 2002)

Disciplinary Differences in Research Performance by Female Academicians: The Effect of the Proportion of Women

The purpose of this study is to provide evidence of occupational/ disciplinary differences in women's research production and to examine these differences from various theoretical perspectives. It is clear that research performance is central to advancement in the profession and is, therefore, an important area of inquiry (e.g. Blackburn et a1,,1978; Smart & McLaughlin,1978; Weiss & Lillard,1982). It is also clear that women tend to be less .productive in research than men and generally do not fare as well in terms of career outcomes (Astin, 1978,1984; Cole,1979; Reskin,1978). Given the importance of research performance in the typical academic career, knowledge about occupation-specific performance differences is important to women who are engaged in (or aspire to) careers in academe