A Conceptual Taxonomy of Technology Adoption and Diffusion in the Classroom

We suggest that faculty adoption patterns move through three identifiable stages (cf. Rayport and Sviokla 1995). In Stage 1, technology serves a support function which improves efficiency, but does not significantly impact teaching. During Stage 2, teaching technology enables faculty to efficiently mirror classroom activities utilizing new technologies. Stage 3 utilization of technology not only supports and mirrors current activities; the goal is to substantively improve teaching and to strengthen the interaction between students and professors; unique applications result in improved application of new technologies. Our conceptualization should help departments and individuals better understand how they are currently using technology, to identify barriers which hinder stage 3 adoption behavior, and to develop goals and create applications which will push faculty beyond using new technologies merely to support or mirror previous functions

The Evolving IT - Marketing Strategy Relationship: Will Business Schools Meet the Need?

As eCommerce grows in importance, the use of information technologies, such as web sites and corporate extranets is increasingly customer facing. As a result, an increased integration between IT and business-marketing strategic functions is necessary in businesses. An important consequence of this integration is that students, employees, and managers must be trained to operate in this cross-disciplinary business world. We review the historical role of technology in businesses, arguing that the role of technology in organizations has evolved from a paradigm in which technology served primarily as a support function to being a critical business function that cannot be properly executed without an understanding of consumer behavior and marketing strategy. We suggest that business schools need to redefine disciplinary boundaries, allow cross-disciplinary student majors, and rethink their missions. New research streams and courses must be developed, and time-to-publication windows need to be shorter for research findings to be relevant to the New Economy

An Exploration of High-Risk Leisure Consumption Through Skydiving

A sociocultural approach is used to explore voluntary high-risk consumption Specifically, we examine the dynamics of individuals\u27 motives, risk perceptions, and benefit/cost outcomes of participation in increasingly popular high-risk leisure activities such as skydiving, climbing, and BASE jumping (parachuting from fixed objects). An ethnography of a skydiving subculture provides the primary empirical data. We propose an extended dramatic model that explains both macroenvironmental and inter- and intrapersonal influences and motives for high-risk consumption. Key findings indicate (1) an evolution of motives that explains initial and continuing participation in high-risk activities and (2) a coinciding evolution of risk acculturation that leads to the normalization of risk