Cross-cultural issues in information flow and electronic communications media use

This paper describes the author's recent work studying information technology use and user expectations across cultures. Computer networks are increasingly used to provide information and coordinate resources across geographic and national boundaries. Information technologies such as electronic mail and distributed collaborative conferencing systems can substantially improve task coordination and distributed team performance. However, cultural differences in user expectations, use of available information, or response to technology or situation constraints can also lead to significant coordination losses in time critical situations. The author's work has examined the impact of situational and user expectations as critical sociotechnical factors affecting information technology acceptance. Rather than simply describing cross-cultural differences according to country of residence or origin, these studies are highlighting underlying task and social personality variables as cultural covariates. Work and task orientations, time sensitivity, and avoidance of uncertainty are variables known to vary both within and across national culture groupings. These and other variables are examined in studies of information technology use in high-tech organizations and international disaster relief scenarios. Comparisons to Hofstede's cultural classification clusters are also presented.