The adoption of discontinuous technologies in the time of Covid-19: criticisms for micro family businesses.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.19245/25.05.pij.6.2.4Keywords:
digital technologies, Covid-19, micro family businesses, discontinuous technologiesAbstract
The Covid-19 emergency has imposed on companies a new way of working through technologies that have ensured business activity. This article analyzes the dynamics of the adoption of technology in micro family businesses at the time of Covid-19, focusing on the phase in which the decision is made to adopt a technology. In particular, it analyzes the influence of the family on the adoption of discontinuous technologies. The sample studied was constituted by fifteen micro-enterprises from southern Italy. In particular, all the companies included in the research are part of Coldiretti, the largest association that represents and assists Italian farms. The companies studied were examined with a qualitative analysis conducted between March and June 2020 through semi-structured telephone interviews due to problems related to the coronavirus pandemic. The present research identifies the micro-level factors affecting the decision to adopt discontinuous technology in order to detect more clearly how innovation in the context of the family business takes place in a different and distinctive way. This study also illustrates some practical implications derived from the model developed and provides useful indications for future studies.
References
Aguilera, A., Lethiais, V., Rallet, A., and Proulhac, L. (2016), Home-based telework in France: Characteristics, barriers and perspectives. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 92, 1–11.
Bird, S.L. (2011), Seeking the audience for news: response, news talk, and everyday practices. In: Nightingale, V. (Ed.), The Handbook of Media Audiences. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK, pp. 489–508.
Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y., and Jordan, M.I. (2003), “Latent dirichlet allocation”, Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3: 993–1022
Bloom, N., and Van Reenen, J. (2006), Management practices, work-life balance, and productivity: A review of some recent evidence. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 22: 457–482.
Bourdieu, P. (1991), Language and symbolic power. Harverd University Press.
Cascio, W. F., and Montealegre, R. (2016), How Technology Is Changing Work and Organizations. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3(1): 349–375.
Chang, J., Boyd-Graber, J., Gerrish, S., Wang, C., and Blei, D.M. (2009), “Reading tea leaves: How humans interpret topic models”. In Advances in neutral information processing systems, Y. Bengio, D. Schuurmans, J.D. Lafferty, C.K.I. Williams, & A. Culotta (Eds.), vol. 22. Retrieved from https://papers.nips.cc/paper/3700-reading-tea-leaves-how-humansinterpret-topic-models.pdf
Cornelissen, J.P. (2013), Portrait of an entrepreneur: Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, and the entrepreneurial imagination. Academy of Management Review, 38 (4): 700–709.
Daniels, K., Lamond, D.A., and Standen, P. (Eds.), (2000), Managing telework: Perspectives from human resource management and work psychology. London, UK: Thomson Learning.
DiMaggio, P., Nag, M., and Blei, D. (2013), Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture: Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding. Poetics, 41 (6), 570–606.
Eurofound and the International Labour Office (2017), Working anytime, anywhere: The effects on the world of work, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, and the International Labour Office, Geneva. http://eurofound.link/ef1658
Feldman, S., (2003), Enforcing social conformity: a theory of authoritarianism. Political Psychology, 24: 41–74.
Ferri, P., Lusiani, M., Pareschi, L. (2018) “Accounting for Accounting History: A topic modeling approach (1996–2015)” Accounting History, 23(1–2): 173–205.
Ferri, P., Lusiani, M., and Pareschi, L. (2020), Shades of theory: A topic modelling of ways of theorizing in accounting history research. Accounting History, 103237322096427. https://doi.org/10.1177/1032373220964271
Fligstein, N., Stuart Brundage, J., Schultz, M. (2017), “Seeing like the Fed: Culture, cognition, and framing in the failure to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008” American Sociological Review, 82, (5): 879–909.
Gajendran, R.S., and Harrison, D.A. (2007), “The good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting: Meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 92: 1524–1541.
Goffman, E. (1974), Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harper & Row.
Golden, T. D., Veiga, J. F., and Simsek, Z. (2006), “Telecommuting’s differential impact on work-family conflict: Is there no place like home?”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 91 (6): 1340–1350.
Grimmer, J., and Stewart, B. M. (2013), “Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts”, Political Analysis, 21 (3): 267–297.
Hagelund, A. (2020), “After the refugee crisis: public discourse and policy change in Denmark, Norway and Sweden”, Comparative Migration Studies, 8 (13) https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0169-8
Hannigan, T., Haans, R.F.J., Vakili, K., Tchalian, H., Glaser, V., Wang, M., Kaplan, S., and P. Devereaux Jennings (2019), “Topic Modeling in Management Research: rendering New Theory from textual data”, Academy of Management Annals, 13 (2):586-632.
Hardy, C., and Maguire, S. (2008), Institutional Entrepreneurship. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin, & R. Suddaby (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 198–217), Sage.
Hoffman, A.J. (1999), “Institutional evolution and change: environmentalism and the US chemical industry”, Academy of Management Journal, 42 (4): 351-371.
Iyengar, S., and Kinder, D.R. (1987), News that Matters: Agenda-Setting and Priming in a Television Age. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Jackson, P. (Ed.), (1999), Virtual working: Social and organisational dynamics. London, UK/New York, NY: Routledge.
Jackson, P., and Van der Wielen, J.M. (Eds.), (1998), Teleworking: International perspectives, from telecommuting to the virtual organization. London, UK: Routledge.
Kelliher, C., and Anderson, D. (2008), “For better or for worse? An analysis of how flexible working practices influence employees’ perceptions of job quality”, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 19: 419–431.
Kelliher, C., and Anderson, D. (2010), Doing more with less? Flexible working practices and the intensification of work. Human Relations, 63: 83–106.
Korac-Kakabadse, N., Kouzmin, A., and Korac-Kakabadse, A. (2018), “Techno-stress: The Need for HRM Reinvention for the Digital Age. In F. Analoui”, The Changing Patterns of Human Resource Management, 65–87, Lodon: Routledge.
Lawrence, T.B. (2008), “Power, institutions and organizations”, in Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Sahlin, K. and Suddaby, R. (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, Sage, London, 170–197.
McCallum, A.K (2002), Mallet: A Machine Learning for Language Toolkit. http://mallet.cs.umass.edu.
Meyer, R. E., and Höllerer, M.A. (2010), “Meaning structures in a contested issue field: A topographic map of shareholder value in Austria”, Academy of Management Journal, 53 (6): 1241–1262.
Mohr, J.W., and P. Bogdanov. (2013), “Introduction—Topic models: What they are and why they matter”, Poetic,s 41: 545–569.
Mollona, E., and Pareschi, L. (2020), “A gramscian perspective on field dynamics. The case of the privatization of Italian steel industry”, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 36 (4), 101128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2020.101128
Molotch, H., Lester, M., (1974), “News as purposive behavior: on the strategic use of routine events, accidents and scandals”, American Sociological Review, 39, 101–112.
Moon, C. and Stanworth, C. (1997), “Ethical issues of teleworking”, A European Review, 6 (1): 35–45.
Nilles, J. (1975), Telecommunications and Organizational Decentralization. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 23 (10), 1142-1147
Nilles, J. M. (1998), Managing telework: Strategies for managing the virtual workforce. New York, NY: Wiley.
Pareschi, L., and Lusiani, M. (2020), What editors talk about when they talk about editors? A public discourse analysis of market and aesthetic logics. Poetics, 101444.
Pedersen, J. S., and Dobbin, F. (1997), The social invention of collective actors. American Behavioral Scientist, 40 (4): 431–443.
Peters, P., Bleijenberg, I., Oldenkamp, E. (2009), The Telework Adoption Process in a Dutchand French Subsidiary of the Same ICT-Multinational: How National Culture and Management Principles Affect the Success of Telework Programs. The Journal of eWorking, 3 (1): 1–16.
Peters, P., Poutsma, E., Van der Heijden, B. I. J. M., Bakker, A. B., and Bruijn, T. de. (2014), Enjoying New Ways to Work: An HRM-Process Approach to Study Flow. Human Resource Management, 53 (2): 271–290.
Price, V., Tewksbury, D., (1997), News values and public opinion: a theoretical account of media priming and framing. In: Barnett, G., Boster, F.J. (Eds.), Progress in Communication Science. Ables, Greenwich, CT, 173–212.
Schmiedel, T., Müller, O., and vom Brocke, J. (2019), Topic Modeling as a Strategy of Inquiry in Organizational Research: A Tutorial With an Application Example on Organizational Culture. Organizational Research Methods, 22(4), 941–968.
Sparrow, P. R., and Daniels, K. (1999), Human resource management and the virtual organisation. Mapping the future research issues. Journal of Organizational Behaviour, 20, 45–62.
Strauss, A., Corbin, J. (1990) Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Stryker, R. (2000), “Legitimacy processes as institutional politics: implications for theory and research in the sociology of organizations”, Research in the Sociology of Organizations: 79-223.
