Situated cultural approach versu predefined cultural archetypes models

Within the last 20 years, the practical relevance of researching cultural issues, and especially comparing phenomena across cultures, was questioned (Ferraro, 1990). However, the importance of cultural issues is becoming increasingly evident in many applied disciplines; these include the management of information technology (IT) (Davison and Martinsons, 2003). A normative literature review has been carried out in this paper to provide IS researchers with the milestones of studying culture in IS discipline. Although there are many different models of national culture, most IS research has tended to rely almost solely on Hofstede’s cultural model (Keil et al., 2000; Straub, 1994; Tan et al., 1995; Watson et al., 1994; Myers and Tan, 2002; Kirkman et al. 2006).). In this paper, the author provides a criticism of predefined cultural archetypes models and highlight the problems of using such approach in studying culture within IS discipline. The author demonstrates a comprehensive framework of situated culture approach to study culture within IS discipline, as alternative approach to avoid the criticism of predefined cultural archetypes models. This is achieved via an articulation of Structuration Theory. The author argues that using a practice lens for studying the use of technology by Orlikowski (2000), contributes to identifying the mediated shared structures between actors through understanding the actions of the actors within IS phenomena. Then, using a Structurational analysis approach by Walsham (2002) contributes to identifying the cultural dimensions that are embedded in the identified mediated shared structures

Charged Particles' Tunneling from Hot-NUT-Kerr-Newman-Kasuya Spacetime

We study the Hawking radiation as charged particles' tunneling across the horizons of the Hot-NUT-Kerr-Newman-Kasuya spacetime by considering the spacetime background as dynamical and incorporating the self-gravitation effect of the emitted particles when the energy conservation, the angular momentum conservation, and the electric charge conservation are taken into account. Our result shows that the tunneling rate is related to the change of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the radiant spectrum is not pure thermal, but is consistent with an underlying unitary theory. The emission process is a reversible one, and the information is preserved as a natural result of the first law of black hole thermodynamics.Comment: To appear in: Int. J. Theor. Phy

Adoption of CRM: cross-cultural impact, a literature review

In a competitive world there is a need for companies to maximise all their resources. One of the resources that is often overlooked is that of existing customer base. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an area that is becoming increasingly popular as it provides a method of maximising existing customer resource as well as adding value from the customers’ perception. CRM systems are used in many multinational organizations mainly to achieve customer loyalty and retention, increase cross selling and to improve customer satisfaction. A normative review of researches done to evaluate CRM systems shows that between 25 to 75 percent of CRM systems have failed (to various degrees) because of neglecting cultural awareness. Implementing CRM systems is a time consuming and expensive business, and the impact of failure can have a dramatic effect on the organization IT investment. Multinational organizations face the situation of how to adopt CRM implementation process according to differences in culture factors from country to country. Although there are studies that investigate the relation of cultural issues to general IT implementations, there is a noticeable lack of literature on the impact of cross-cultural on CRM implementation. This paper focuses on the impact of cross-cultural on CRM systems, and tries to summarize work done to explore the cultural awareness’ issues that influence CRM system