Mobile Devices in Social Contexts

The development of mobile devices has occurred with unprecedented pace since the late nineties, and the increase of generic services has proliferated in most developed countries, driven by the expanding technological capabilities and performance of mobile platforms. This dissertation investigates how consumer objectives, orientation, and behavior can aid in explaining the adoption and use of a new type of mobile devices: “app phones”. This dissertation focuses its effort on two focal influences of adoption and use; social influences and competing forces. Through a qualitative case study and field study this dissertation explores early adoption and use of iPhones. The case study is a one-shot cross-sectional case study that investigates five individuals, related through the same social network, and their decision to adopt an iPhone prior to its release in Denmark. This adoption decision engenders high switching costs as adopters lack references to imitate and need skills to unlock and jailbreak their iPhones to make them work on Danish networks. The specific purpose of the case study is to explore how social influences impact mobile users’ early adoption decisions, as it is well known in the literature that people with similar characteristics, tastes, and beliefs often associate in the same social networks and, hence, influence each other. The field study is cross-sectional with multiple snapshots and explores fifteen individuals part of the same university study, who receives an iPhone for a period of seven months short after its release in Denmark. The specific purpose of the field study is to explore how competing forces of iPhone usage influence assimilation, i.e. the degree to which the iPhone is used, over time. The dissertation, furthermore, contains a systematic literature review. The main contribution of this dissertation is reported through four articles and is directed at both academic researchers and practitioners. The study emphasizes the importance of social influences and competing forces in the investigation of adoption and use of certain mobile devices

Guarding Against the Erosion of Competitive Advantage: A Knowledge Leakage Mitigation Model

A critical objective of knowledge-intensive organizations is to prevent erosion of their competitive knowledge base through leakage. Our review of the literature highlights the need for a more refined conceptualization of perceived leakage risk. We propose a Knowledge Leakage Mitigation (KLM) model to explain the incongruity between perceived high-risk of leakage and lack of protective actions. We argue that an organization’s perceived risk of leakage increases if competitors can benefit from leakage incidents. Further, perceived leakage risk decreases if the organization is shielded from impact due to their diversity of knowledge assets and their ability to reconfigure knowledge resources to refresh their competitive knowledge base. We describe our approach to the design of a large-scale survey instrument that has been tested and refined in two stakeholder communities: 1) knowledge managers responsible for organizational strategy, and 2) Information security management consultants

Asset Identification in Information Security Risk Assessment: A Business Practice Approach

Organizations apply information security risk assessment (ISRA) methodologies to systematically and comprehensively identify information assets and related security risks. We review the ISRA literature and identify three key deficiencies in current methodologies that stem from their traditional accountancy-based perspective and a limited view of organizational “assets”. In response, we propose a novel rich description method (RDM) that adopts a less formal and more holistic view of information and knowledge assets that exist in modern work environments. We report on an in-depth case study to explore the potential for improved asset identification enabled by the RDM compared to traditional ISRAs. The comparison shows how the RDM addresses the three key deficiencies of current ISRAs by providing: 1) a finer level of granularity for identifying assets, 2) a broader coverage of assets that reflects the informal aspects of business practices, and 3) the identification of critical knowledge assets

A multilevel social network perspective on IT adoption

Adoption of technologies has long been a key area of research in the information systems (IS) discipline, and researchers have thus been interested in the attributes, beliefs, intentions, and behaviors of individuals and organisations that could explain information and communication technology (ICT) adoption. The focal unit of adoption has mainly been individuals and organisations, however, research at group or social network level as well as the inter-organizational level have recently gained increased interest from IS researchers. This recent focus supports the view of the world as being the sum of all relations. Various social network theories exist that seek to emphasize different proficiencies of social networks and explain theoretical mechanisms for behavior in social networks. The core idea of these theories is that social networks are valuable, and the relations among actors affect the behavior of individuals, groups, organizations, industries, and societies. IS researchers have also found that social network theory can help explain technology adoption. Some researchers, in addition, acknowledge that most adoption situations involve phenomena occuring at multiple levels, yet most technology adoption research applies a single level of analysis. Multilevel research can address the levels of theory, measurement, and analysis required to fully examining research questions. This paper therfore adapts the Coleman diagram into the Multi-level Framework of Technology. Adoption in order to explain how social network theory, at the individual and social network level, can help explain adoption of ICT. As Coleman (1990) attempts to create a link between the micro and macro level in a holistic manner, his approach is applicable in explaining ICT adoptio