Date of Award

2014-01-01

Degree Name

M.I.T.

Department

Business Administration

Advisor(s)

Kallol Bagchi

Abstract

My research identifies how social structures affect the use of the Internet and/or a mobile chat application and how the Internet impacts the political structure of a nation. In my first essay of the 3-essay Dissertation, I am designing three models based on social structure theory that are used to study the Internet and a popular mobile chat application's use by managers in South Korea, with the help of a survey instrument. In my first essay, the contribution is on i) testing a model of manager's personal behavior on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use at the individual level involving managers only ii) understanding social structure characteristics that play a part in technology use, iii) linking the theories of technology acceptance, social structure and adoption/use of ICT and iv) comparing constructs that predict the use of e-mail by the Internet and mobile chat using a mobile messaging application (called "Kakao talk"), applying the well-known Peterson and Smith framework. The second essay studies the relationship between social structures and use of ICTs at the cross-national level using national and multiple-level models. To explore the relationship between the use of e-mail and social structures (roles, rules and norms), a survey instrument is derived from multiple population surveys that include 3,277 managers from 21 European and four Asian countries. The third essay contributes to the development of a model that examines the role of the Internet on democracy development in these four Asian nations using a Partial Least Squares approach for analysis.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

204 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

SeungEui Ryu

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