Impact of inter organizational networks on adoption process of information technology

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to generate a conceptual framework that reveals the impact of inter-organizational networks on the adoption process of information technologies. A great majority of the previous research that focuses on the adoption process of information technologies are empirical studies based on inter-organizational factors (for instance; the structure, the strategy or culture of the organization). These are the studies which maximize organizational benefit (performance based) and which give suggestions to the practitioners towards increasing efficiency. Unlike these, in this study, the macro factors (for example strong and weak ties, level of dependency, level of isomorphism among organizations) emerging as a result of the inter-organizational interactions were considered instead of intra-organizational factors. Due to the fact that the most significant field of application for information technologies is the organization, a conceptual assessment was made in this study from the aspect of organizational communities and organization theories. In developing this model, basic statements of various organization theories such as network theory, institutional theory and dependency theory were used. At the end of the study, a number of propositions related to inter organizational interaction that affect adoption and sustained use of innovative technologies in a network context are composed for future studies.