Culture in Information Technology adoption

Based on some data from Eurostat , the percentage of Spaniards that are using the Internet to listen to Web radios and/or watching Web TV (23%) is over the EU-27 average (20%), and over the percentage of Irish individuals (13%). However, based on the same statistics from 2009, the percentage of individuals in Spain that are using the Internet to purchase goods or services for private use (16%) is much lower than the EU-27 percentage (28%) and lower than the Irish percentage (29%) too. Do you think that cultural traits can help to understand why Spaniards, in comparison to average EU individuals, use more the Internet for leisure activities than for purchasing goods and services for private use? Culture has been a constant worry in the Information Technology (IT) field, since it has been observed that culture can influence on the success of IT adoption and usage (Leidner & Kayworth, 2006).  At the Innova Institute we believe that individual cultural traits can shed some light to understand these controversial data and to contribute to understand factors affecting IT adoption at a country level and IT acceptance at individual level. We ground our work on previous research contributions that define individual cultural traits as the "subjective culture of an individual, which is related to how much an individual takes from the different cultures that the individual is part of” (Ali and Brooks, 2009; Karahanna et al., 2005; Dorfman and Howell, 1988). Despite the existing need to measure individual culture in IT adoption, a lack of adequate models has been observed. This has motivated researchers at the Innova Institute to contribute in this flourishing academic field. In the coming post, existing individual cultural models and proposals for further refinement will be presented. By the way, do you think that it makes sense to measure individual cultural traits? From your own experience, do you think that your own attitude towards IT usage is influenced by your cultural background? References:

• Ali, M. & Brooks, L. 2009, "A situated cultural approach for cross-cultural studies in IS", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, vol. 22, no.5, pp. 548-563.
• Dorfman, P.W. & Howell, J.P. 1988, “Dimensions of national culture and effective leadership patterns: Hofstede revisited”, Advances in international comparative management, vol. 3, pp. 127-150.
• Karahanna, E., Evaristo, J. & Srite, M. 2005, "Levels of culture and individual behaviour: an integrative perspective", Journal of Global Information Management, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1-20.
• Leidner, D.E. & Kayworth, T. 2006, “A review of culture in information systems research: Toward a theory of information technology culture conflict”, Management Information Systems Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 9.