CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.9 SYNTHESIS AND SUMMARY
A review of existing models of technology acceptance reveals an ongoing debate in this area. This debate surrounds the question of whether technology drives consumers to adopt new tech-based products or whether it is the customers who initiate their use of technology and hence consumption. This thesis unveils that this debate is underpinned by two main theoretical approaches.
The first theoretical approach has a system perspective orientation. It asserts that as long as the technology meets user requirements, it will result in consumer technology adoption.
Theories that are grouped into this category include the Technology Acceptance Model/TAM (Davis 1989), originally derived from the Theory of Reason Action/TRA (1980) and Theory of Planned Behaviour/TPB (1985), and the Unified Theory of Technology Acceptance/UTAUT (Venkatesh et al. 2003). With his Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Davis (1989) proposed that technology is accepted if perceived as having an appropriate function for its users (perceived usefulness), as easy to use and fitting the subjective user. This model has been extended by the inclusion of performance
expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, and become known as the Unified Theory of Technology Acceptance (UTAUT). The common characteristics underpinning these theoretical models focus on technology characteristics, labelled as relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, trialability and observability or perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use by Davis (1989).
The second theoretical approach involves theories that view technology adoption more from the user perspective. The most prominent theories in this group are based on the notions of consumer innovativeness, also known as personal innovativeness (Rogers &
Shoemaker, 1971) and the Technology Readiness Index/TRI (Parasuraman 2000).
Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) argued that consumers who have high innovativeness levels adopt a new product earlier than do others. Innovativeness is seen as an indicator or measure of the tendency and willingness to embrace change and try new things (Hirunyawipada & Paswan 2006). Consumers who are highly innovative are expected to demand new products. Technology readiness, in the same vein, specifies the concept of consumer innovativeness in the context of high-tech technology adoption. It indicates consumers’ propensity to embrace and utilise technologies to carry out activities at home and work.
The literature review also aimed specifically to identify previous efforts at developing models of mobile technology acceptance, revealing that researchers have applied various theoretical models. Among these models, the Technology Acceptance Model has been the mostly widely applied to studies of mobile technology/product/service adoption. TAM is clearly the most accepted reference framework for investigating the formation of the technology adoption process as it can successfuly capture the two most robust adoption dimensions, perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU). These dimesions are derived from technology characteristics, suggesting that a person will be likely to adopt a technology if it is useful and easy to use. However, understanding technology acceptance solely on the basis of these two variables is considered inadequate since it is also important to identify what factors influence a person’s attitude to the technology.
The addition of technology readiness to TAM to form a new model called TRAM (Lin et al.
2007) has created an opportunity to better understand how an individual’s traits and general beliefs affect attitude toward technology. Past research, such as that of Chiu and Tseng (2010), Lam, Chiang and Parasuraman (2008), Sophonthummapharn and Tesar (2007), Yi et al. (2006), and Lin and Hsieh (2007), has proven this factor’s influence in technology acceptance. This, again, suggests that TAM is considered too simple to
adequately explain consumer adoption of technology. TAM is also questioned for its ability to explain technology acceptance in a non-work situation, such as mobile broadband service adoption. The adoption of this kind of service assumes consumer independence, such that their adoption is not compulsory as in the adoption of technology in the workplace (Kwon, HS & Chidambaram, L 2000; Park, Yang & Lehto 2007). Perceived enjoyment (PE) is also considered to be an important factor for inclusion in TAM. This has been suggested by many researchers such as Ha, Yoon and Choi (2007), Shin (2007) and Bruner and Kumar (2005). All of these researchers suggest that TAM exploration has not lost its value, and recommend the pursuit of an integrated model of technology acceptace by adding certain factors to enhance understanding of the interaction between those factors and the main predictors or dimensions of acceptance.
Significant effort has been invested by both researchers and marketers in identifying such an integrated model. Within the context of mobile broadband service acceptance, exploration can start from TAM and TRAM as they have solid support within the field.
They also represent the two theoretical approaches discussed above. Moreover, these two models can potentially act as the baseline model for further development towards a more integrated framework. However, the intuitive idea used by Li et al. (2007) to integrate TR into TAM in developing TRAM still requires further empirical validation. The integration of the individual trait approach and the system perspective approach raises a critical issue about the validity of TRAM. The psychological ‘TRPEOUPUUI’
process of technology acceptance proposed by TRAM implies that the evaluation of new technology systems can only occur if prior knowledge and experience with technology is present and is first retrieved by the consumer to be able to perceive the ease of use and usefulness of the system. However, this notion is questionable since consumers can potentially still observe new technology regardless of their level of technology readiness.
To resolve this issue, a closer examination of TRAM is needed which can be conducted by a comparative analysis between TRAM and TAM. In so doing, it is important to remember that TAM in the TRAM should first be modified by adding perceived enjoyment to the model, as in the work of Shin (2007) and Bruner and Kumar (2005). The next step toward the construction of an integrated model is to select other important factors for inclusion in the model. The focus here is on finding moderating variables instead of mediating ones because many previous studies have incorporated mediating variables without significant improvement in the model’s ability to predict consumer acceptance of mobile broadband services. The identification of potential moderator variables for inclusion in the baseline model is the aim of the following chapter.