Reflexivity, the social actor, and m-service domestication: Linking the human, technological, and contextual

Abstract

The importance of understanding the factors impacting technology acceptance is well emphasized. However, technology acceptance research is primarily oriented to the individual level in which users or consumers are treated as actors typically making one-way adoption or rejection decisions related to the acceptance of new technology. In this article, we argue that such research stops short of acknowledging the influence of agents' social monitoring of own and other's behavior. By leaning on the process of stratification and the construct ofreflexivity, as applied by Giddens (1984), and coupling this with the view that humans are social actors reflexively engaged in the domestication of new technologies, we present the initial progress toward a process model that may guide our understanding of how potential and existing users of new mobile data services learn, draw upon previous and emerging experiences, and thereby bring, or do not bring, new m-services into the performance of everyday practices. Based on the results from our field study, this paper suggests that re-projecting previous experience and reflexivity considerably influences cognition and action in the duration of m-service domestication, thereby bringing complementary understanding to current technology acceptance research. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.