Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Mobile Commerce: A Model to Capture the Cultural and Environment Influences

Introduction

Mobile commerce is a truly global phenomenon. It involves mobile technologies and services that are used in a global market place with similar devices and services being offered in many countries. The service and technology providers are global companies with international user bases. The challenge for the mobile industries and service providers is how to enter the variety of different national markets each with their own environment characteristics and cultural identity.

This research tries to address an issue that is not explicit in much of the existing literature, namely that differences in technology use and adoption may be due to cultural differences or due to differences in the technology infrastructure and general business environment. Previous cultural works seem to not recognize the role of technology and the wider environment in influencing attitudes (e.g. such as Hofstede 1991, 2001; Triandis 1994). Previous technology adoption work (e.g. Davis, 1989; Barnes, 2003; Kleijnen 2003) seems to not recognize environment or cultural impacts on technology adoption.

The purpose of this study is to explore consumers’ attitudes toward mobile commerce from samples in two nations (China and the UK) and to identify and distinguish between influences related to the environment and to culture. This is particularly challenging given that culture and environment are interlinked. The wider influences can be classed as political, economic, social and technological (Hutton 2007; Subramanian 2006; Engel 1995; Miller 1990) and these will consist of environment and cultural aspects. Some existing works do explicitly recognize the wider environmental influences on technology adoption. For instance Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation work, though not explicitly using cultural and the wider environmental influences on adoption patterns and rates, identifies related influences such as the nature of social systems and the existing communication channels (Rogers 2003, p222). Rogers also briefly discusses cultural relativism (ibid, p. 441) which recognizes that each culture should be ‘judged’ in light of its own specific circumstances and needs.