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The study of the adoption and diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is one of the more mature research areas within the Information Systems (IS) discipline, however, much of the activity within this area tends to focus upon conducting investigations from the organizational and/or end-user/employee perspectives. As a result, researchers have been far less frequent to approach the topic of technology diffusion and adoption from the residential/household perspectives of consumers and citizens. While the key role of ICTs within business and government is now well-recognized, it is equally important to acknowledge that in modern society, ICTs have become prevalent in the daily home lives of many individuals in forms such as e-commerce, e-government, e-learning, e-health, and e-working. Indeed, the UN recognizes the importance of the various participating parties -including the citizen as well as organizations- within the digital environment in promoting the development of the information society. This relatively recent emergence of the technology-contextualized home environment has, in turn, generated numerous issues worthy of investigation. This includes understanding the awareness, adoption and usage of emerging technologies and electronic services, and the social exclusion created due to the unequal adoption of technology by different segments of society. Such residential/household-related issues are clearly of interest to IS researchers, having been the focus of a variety of publications including Blackwell (2004), Brown and Venkatesh (2005), Brown et al. (2006), Dwivedi et al., (2006), Shannon (2006) and Venkatesh and Brown (2001). However, given the broad range of issues which offer potentially fruitful areas for investigation, and the varying approaches that may be employed to explore them, it is sometimes unclear where such research outputs have been published.
Reviewing and profiling the existing literature on IS/IT adoption and diffusion is likely to be of use to researchers in assisting them to identify currently under-explored research issues and select theories and methods appropriate to their investigation: all of which are critical issues for conducting productive, original and rigorous research. This will also help to identify the existing strengths and weaknesses of the pertinent research streams, promote discussion regarding critical issues in the area, and assist in the identification of alternative theoretical and methodological perspectives (Venkatesh et al., 2007).