Mobile payments: A proposal for a context-oriented approach based on socio-technical theory

Abstract

A recent review of mobile payment research by Dahlberg et al. (2015) concludes that there is a need to synthesise this research area by studying contexts in which innovation is carried out and to integrate different aspects of research. This article aims to provide a proposal for how to achieve such integration and context orientation by building on previous studies and offering an additional review. Our systematic literature review of mobile payments research is focused on papers published during 2006–2016. The main objective is to examine how mobile payments research has been conducted from the methodological and theoretical perspectives. Our findings show that research on mobile payments is a multidisciplinary research. Three main themes in the research (in line with previous studies) are customer adoption, technological aspects, and business aspects. Moreover, research is mainly analytical based on a deductive approach. To meet the challenge formulated in the previous research, we propose and apply a socio-technical system framework to achieve synthesis and context-specific consideration in future research on mobile payments.