Factors Affecting the Organizational Adoption of Blockchain Technology: Extending the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) Framework in the Australian Context

Blockchain technology (BCT) has been gaining popularity due to its benefits for almost every industry. However, despite its benefits, the organizational adoption of BCT is rather limited. This lack of uptake motivated us to identify the factors that influence the adoption of BCT from an organizational perspective. In doing this, we reviewed the BCT literature, interviewed BCT experts, and proposed a research model based on the TOE framework. Specifically, we theorized the role of technological (perceived benefits, compatibility, information transparency, and disintermediation), organizational (organization innovativeness, organizational learning capability, and top management support), and environmental (competition intensity, government support, trading partners readiness, and standards uncertainty) factors in the organizational adoption of BCT in Australia. We confirmed the model with a sample of adopters and potential adopter organizations in Australia. The results show a significant role of the proposed factors in the organizational adoption of BCT in Australia. Additionally, we found that the relationship between the influential factors and BCT adoption is moderated by “perceived risks”. The study extends the TOE framework by adding factors that were ignored in previous studies on BCT adoption, such as perceived information transparency, perceived disintermediation, organizational innovativeness, organizational learning capability, and standards uncertainty.

In Cloud We Trust? Co-opting Occupational Gatekeepers to Produce Normalized Trust in Platform-Mediated Interorganizational Relationships

Interorganizational trust plays an important role in facilitating business relationships, especially for the organizational adoption of new services. Prior research suggests that interorganizational trust develops when the trustor has adequate confidence in the reliability of the trustee’s services. Nevertheless, reliability breakdowns are also an inevitable part of service provisioning. Such breakdowns are especially prominent and visible in the context of platform-based services. Yet platform-based services continue to be adopted and used by organizational customers. This increased adoption and use of such services despite their inconsistent reliability pose the following question. How is trust produced in platform-mediated interorganizational relationships? To examine this question, I conducted a 20-month field study of a cloud computing platform provider and its customers, focusing on the practices of trust production in the wake of reliability breakdowns. Here, I describe customer concerns about the platform’s inconsistent reliability that hampered the development of interorganizational trust. I then identify four practices of trust work enacted by the platform provider to address some of these concerns and to co-opt the occupational gatekeepers in customer organizations who are responsible for technology adoption decisions. Following this, I describe how and why these occupational gatekeepers performed justification work to rationalize the continued use of the platform despite its inconsistent reliability. Together, trust work and justification work facilitate the coproduction of interorganizational trust through normalizing reliability breakdowns as “business-as-usual” events. Synthesizing these findings, I developed a normalization model of trust production, and discuss the implications of normalized trust for platform-mediated interorganizational relationships in the digital economy.

Factors affecting organizational adoption and acceptance of computer-based security awareness training tools

Purpose As insiders remain to be a main reason behind security breaches, effective information security awareness campaigns become critical in protecting organizations from security incidents. The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that influence organizational adoption and acceptance of computer-based security awareness training tools. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses content analysis of online reviews of the top ten computer-based security awareness training tools that received Gartner peer insights Customers’ Choice 2019 award. Findings This study identifies nine critical adoption and success factors. These are synthesized into a conceptual framework based on the technology–organization–environment framework. The findings reveal that technological, organizational and environmental factors come into play in adoption decisions but with varying degrees of importance. Practical implications This study highlights key factors that technology vendors should take into consideration when designing computer-based security awareness training tools to increase adoption rates. Originality/value This research offers a novel contribution to the literature on information security awareness delivery methods by identifying key factors that influence organizational adoption and acceptance of computer-based security awareness training tools. Those factors were identified using content analysis of online reviews, which is a new methodological approach to the information security awareness literature.

In Cloud We Trust? Coopting Occupational Gatekeepers to Produce Normalized Trust in Platform-mediated Interorganizational Relationships

Interorganizational trust plays an important role in facilitating business relationships, especially for the organizational adoption of new services. Prior research suggests that interorganizational trust develops when the trustor has adequate confidence in the reliability of the trustee’s services. Nevertheless, reliability breakdowns are also an inevitable part of service provisioning. Such breakdowns are especially prominent and visible in the context of platform-based services. Yet, platform-based services continue to be adopted and used by organizational customers. This increased adoption and use of such services despite its inconsistent reliability pose the following question: how is trust produced in platform-mediated interorganizational relationships? To examine this question, I conduct a 20-month field of a cloud computing platform provider and its customers, focusing on the practices of trust production in the wake of reliability breakdowns. I describe customer concerns about the platform’s inconsistent reliability that hampered the development of interorganizational trust. I then identify four practices of trust work enacted by the platform provider to address some of these concerns and to coopt the occupational gatekeepers in customer organizations who are responsible for technology adoption decisions. Following this, I describe how and why these occupational gatekeepers performed justification work to rationalize the continued use of the platform despite its inconsistent reliability. Together, trust work and justification work facilitate the co-production of interorganizational trust through normalizing reliability breakdowns as “business-as-usual” events. Synthesizing these findings, I develop a normalization model of trust production and discuss the implications of normalized trust for platform-mediated interorganizational relationships in the digital economy.