Cultural Influences on it use Amongst Factory Managers: A UK-Japanese Comparison

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyse the influence of national cultural factors on the use of information technology (IT) by managers. An analysis of the existing literature on the interplay between technology, culture and organizational context indicates that the influence of national culture needs to be carefully specified if it is to be differentiated from institutional and organizational factors. Moreover, insofar as such influence operates at all, it is subsumed within, and not exterior to, a dynamic and emergent process of interaction between technology design and organizational practices. In this light, the study presented here seeks to avoid a simplistic approach in which national culture is viewed as an exogenous force directly conditioning action, but rather posits such influence as a critical element of the wider context which enframes action. These considerations were reflected in the research design of the empirical study presented here. This involved a survey of managers in over 1400 firms across five industrial sectors in the UK and Japan. These countries were chosen because previous studies had indicated that they exhibit distinctive cultural differences in their management practices. By conducting a large-scale survey across a range of sectors, the study aimed to abstract the diffuse effect of these cultural differences from the specific impact of sectorial and organizational contingencies. In particular, questions within the survey sought to explore the extent to which managerial preferences and practices in IT use could be interpreted in terms of two key dimensions of national cultural difference. The latter were operationalized in this study as a control orientation to IT use, and an individualistic orientation to IT use, respectively. The overall analysis of the survey data suggests that the effect of national culture is significant and seems to operate across industry boundaries. Managers in Japanese factories do in fact exhibit the hypothesized stronger orientation towards a control orientation in the use of IT, while managers in British factories show a relatively stronger orientation towards individualistic use of IT at the management level.