Examining User Technology Interaction: Toward a Sociotechnical Theory for Understanding User Adjustment to Mobile Technologies

Abstract

Researchers from organization, management, and information systems areas have studied the impact of information technology (IT) on users in organizations for several decades. As a form of emerging technology, mobile computing has raised new research directions, as well as challenges for both computer scientists and social scientists. In this paper, we explore the issues of how well the emerging mobile computing technologies conform to past models and predictions that have been offered for explaining the impacts of IT. In particular, this paper identifies the general lack of attention to individual-level differences that may interact with contextual factors to shape organizational users’ reactions to this new computing paradigm. We thus propose that IS researchers consider a specific sociotechnical theory – Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA) – to investigate how individual users adjust to technology-initiated changes in work practices resulting from mobile technologies. By highlighting the insights offered by TWA, we believe that this model is useful for analyzing individual responses to the adoption of mobile computing technologies.

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