Guest Editorial: A profile of adoption of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) research in the household context

Excerpt

Although the study of the adoption and diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) is one of the more mature research areas within the IS discipline, much of the work to date has focused on conducting investigations from organizational and/or end-user/employee perspectives. While the key role of ICT within business and government is now well-recognized, it is also important to acknowledge that in modern society, ICT has 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. This relatively recent emergence of the technology-contextualized home environment has, in turn, generated numerous issues worthy of investigation, including awareness, adoption and usage of emerging technologies and electronic services, and social exclusion due to unequal adoption by different segments of society. Given the broad range of issues offering potentially fruitful areas for investigation, there are several approaches that may be employed to study the phenomenon. Therefore, the objective of this special issue was to provide a platform for the presentation and discussion of original research into emerging issues surrounding ICT adoption (and non-adoption) among individual consumers in a residential/household context. …