The role of culture in Social Networks adoption

Social networks are a technology which has been rapidly adopted, as it happened before with television, computers or Internet. However, everybody does not have the same behavior in the network and some people are really concerned about the privacy threatening features. By the way, are you concerned about using features like posting pictures or similar in your social network? Innova Institute is studying how the cultural factors could influence the adoption of privacy threatening features in social networks. For this research, Innova Institute is considering a research scope that includes: IT adoption variables, individual culture values, and trust influence. IT adoption is a research field which explains which factors influence in the adoption of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). According to some research models (Venkatesh et al., 2003), the variables that determine IT user acceptance are: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. Culture has been studied through cultural values, its influence and impact has been a persistent worry to management researchers (Tsui & Nifadkar, 2007). More recently, as the number of projects that include cross-cultural participants has consistently increased, both academics and practitioners have made efforts to further understand the role of cultural values in IT adoption and acceptance. In our research model, individual cultural values are introduced as mediators of the IT user acceptance variables. Finally, trust has been studied in management research, specifically in e-commerce adoption (Gefen et al., 2003). Privacy concerns and fraud avoidance are the most important components of trust for online users. Our research model has been completed with the effect of trust on the usage of Social Networks privacy threatening features. As we are in the initial stages of this project, we would like to know your opinion about this research. Do you thing that people from countries with high level of collectivism, like Brazil, China, and South Corea will be less concerned about posting their pictures in a public areas of social network? Please, let us know if you would be willing to participate in this research project. References:

• Gefen, D., Karahanna, E. & Straub, D.W. 2003, "Trust and TAM in online shopping: An integrated model", Mis Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 51-90.
• Tsui, A. S. & Nifadkar, S.S. 2007, "Cross-national, cross-cultural organizational behavior research: Advances, gaps, and recommendations", Journal of management, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 426.
• Venkatesh, V., Morris, M.G., Davis, G.B. & Davis, F.D. 2003, "User acceptance of information techonolgy: Toward a unified view", Mis Quarterly, vol. 27., no. 3, pp. 425-478.