Lars Andreas Knutsen

The four incremental steps toward advanced mobile service adoption

Exploring mobile device user adoption patterns and market segmentation.

Reflexivity, the Social Actor, and M-Service Domestication: Linking the Human, Technological, and Contextual

The importance of understcmding the factors impacting technology acceptance is well emphasized. However, technology acceptance research is primarily oriented to the individual level in which users or consumers are treated as actors typically making one-way adoption or rejection decisions related to the acceptance of new technology. In this article, we argue that such research stops short of acknowledging the influence of agents’ social monitoring of own and other’s behavior. By leaning on the process of stratiflcation and the construct of reflexivity, as applied by Giddens (1984), and coupling this with the view that humans are social actors reflexively engaged in the domestication of new technologies, we present the initial progress toward a process model that may guide our understanding of how potential and existing users of new mobile data services learn, draw upon previous and emerging experiences, and thereby bring, or do not bring, new m-services into the Performance of everyday practices. Based on the results front our field study, this paper suggests that re-projecting previous experience and reflexivity considerably influences cognition and action in the duration of m-service domestication, thereby bringing complementary understanding to current technology acceptance research.

Messaging specifications, properties and gratifications as institutions: How messaging institutions shaped wireless service diffusion in Norway and Japan

We address the following question: why have a large number of mobile services been successful in Japan but received only lukewarm response in Norway despite Norways lead in the late 1990s in wireless messaging? Current explanations are not sufficient in explaining this dilemma. We approach mobile service diffusion through the lens of new institutionalism by analyzing how messaging institutions emerged both on supply and demand sides that enabled and constrained mobile service innovation. A tripartite framework of institutional fields consisting of architectural service specifications, service properties, and use gratifications is formulated. Using secondary data we show that mobile service specifications in Japan integrated better interpersonal communication and data services and thereby allowed instrumental and aesthetic properties to align with expressive properties of messaging. In Norway disjoint service specifications caused service properties and gratifications to remain disconnected, which inhibited data service adoption and channeled data service adoption towards simple SMS based messaging solutions. Differences in service specifications and prospective gratifications not only account for differences in overall service diffusion, but offer valuable insights into institutional forces that shape complex mobile service innovation.

The Difference is in Messaging

This paper extends common contentions of why the mobile Internet has been widely embraced in Japan but obtained lukewarm reaction in most GSM countries. In particular, we analyze commonalities and differences pertaining to the wireless killer application in both the West and the East — messaging. A framework consisting of service specifications, properties and gratifications is used to analyze short messaging, multimedia messaging and e-mail in Scandinavia and Japan. An architecture which better supports interlinking, integrating and transitioning of interpersonal and data-based communications over the service platform was successfully established in Japan while the disjointed nature of messaging, multimedia messaging and data services has inhibited Scandinavian users to fully embrace the mobile Internet. In Japan mobile e-mail integrated instrumental and aesthetic service properties on top of the powerful expressive service properties. Accordingly, content and process gratifications have augmented powerful social gratifications which initially have been driving m-service use in both places. Idiosyncrasies identified across service integration provide insights to critical enabling and constraining factors that shape development of mobile services.