Editorial: Cyber-Slacking and NASA’s Semantic Web: Two Papers

In this issue of JITTA we are pleased to publish two papers in the domain of web usage that, however, address very different issues

The Influence of National Culture on the Acceptance and Use of Information Technologies: An Empirical Study

This dissertation examines the influence of national culture on the acceptance and use of information technologies. An extended model of technology acceptance is developed and specific cultural dimensions are hypothesized to influence the extended model

Towards the development of an Inter-Cultural Scale to Measure Trust in Automation

Trust is conceived as an attitude leading to intentions resulting in user actions involving automation. It is generally believed that trust is dynamic and that a user’s prior experience with automation affects future behavior indirectly through causing changes in trust. Additionally, individual differences and cultural factors have been frequently cited as the contributors to influencing trust beliefs about using and monitoring automation. The presented research focuses on modeling human’s trust when interacting with automated systems across cultures. The initial trust assessment instrument, comprising 110 items along with 2 perceptions (general vs. specific use of automation), has been empirically validated. Detailed results comparing items and dimensionality with our new pooled measure will be presented

Benign Envy, Social Media, and Culture

Researchers have very limited understanding of how continuous usage intention of social media (SM) are associated with online benign envy and individual-level culture. This paper addresses this gap and provides a theoretical framework to illustrate how manifestations of national cultural values at the individual level of analysis may influence SM use behaviors through online envy. We argue that espoused individualism/collectivism and espoused uncertainty avoidance are important antecedents for eliciting benign envy, while the espoused power distance and espoused masculinity/femininity dimensions are salient moderators for the consequences resulting from online benign envy. Empirical results from a sample of 387 SM users supported the majority of the hypotheses, suggesting that espoused national culture interplaying with online benign envy are important factors for continuance use intention of SM. Finally, theoretical contributions and practical implications are provided

A cross-cultural examination of the impact of social, organisational and individual factors on educational technology acceptance between British and Lebanese university students

This paper examines the social, organisational and individual factors that may affect students' acceptance of e-learning systems in higher education in a cross-cultural context. A questionnaire was developed based on an extended technology acceptance model (TAM). A total sample of 1173 university students from two private universities in Lebanon and one university in England participated in this study. After performing the satisfactory reliability and validity checks, the hypothesised model was estimated using structural equation modeling. The findings of this study revealed that perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), social norms (SNs), perceived quality of work life (QWL), computer self-efficacy (SE) and facilitating conditions (FC) are significant determinants of behavioural intentions (BIs) and usage of e-learning system for the Lebanese and British students. QWL, the newly added variable, was found the most important construct in explaining the causal process in the model for both samples. Differences were found between Lebanese and British students with regard to PEOU, SN, QWL, FC, SE and actual usage; however, no differences were detected in terms of PU and BI. Overall, the proposed model achieves acceptable fit and explains for 69% of the British sample and 57% of the Lebanese sample of its variance which is higher than that of the original TAM. Our findings suggest that individual, social and organisational factors are important to consider in explaining students' BI and usage of e-learning environments

A Cultural Perspective on Technology Acceptance

This preliminary study focused on the cultural dimension of masculinity/femininity. Unlike many cultural studies that have utilized previously published country-level scores for dimensions of culture, this study surveyed individuals from thirty-four different countries to determine their score on the masculinity/femininity continuum. These results were part of a research model containing culture, gender, and intention to use computers. Three 2X2 between-subjects factorial ANOVAs were conducted. We found statistically significant main effects for the masculinity/femininity, and national origin. The results indicate that a user’s masculinity/femininity score, and national origin have an impact on his or her intention to adopt a technology

Does Culture Affect the Usage of Digital Disruption Innovations: A Study Using Instagram

Online social networks are growing rapidly. As people from all over the world can use these sites without any geographic boundaries, it becomes difficult for organizations to predict user behavior. Prior literature revealed that most previous studies focused on a single culture and on a single social networking site, mainly Facebook. Also, even if there were cross-national cultural studies, they were primarily based on Hofstede’s cultural index scores. In this study, we focus on espoused national cultural values in the usage of Instagram. We propose a model and conduct a pilot test. Results indicate that people who espouse more collectivistic values tend to use Instagram more frequently and are more likely to share more posts