The information society in the 21st century is rapidly changing the overall paradigm of business and society as well as the environment of individuals from the development of internet and information & telecommunications technology. Presently, these a ...
The information society in the 21st century is rapidly changing the overall paradigm of business and society as well as the environment of individuals from the development of internet and information & telecommunications technology. Presently, these are creating an enormous value in the national economy and industries as they are rapidly diffused throughout the industries such as distribution, finance, stock trade, auction, entertainment, and delivery service. Especially for businesses, the information technology (IT) is not an issue of selection but the general trend that can not go against for the sake of survival. In other words, this seems to tell that it can be a fatal threat to the business unable to use IT and can be a great opportunity to the business of using IT appropriately. Likewise, internet and IT have brought about a large change as to be regarded as an innovation in the entire society and individuals and businesses have tried hard to adopt and use IT so as to adapt to this change.
As mentioned previously, IT is used usefully when individual or business creates new value. Despite of that, IT still holds many problems from the adverse function of information promotion and hence, individuals and businesses experience various IT failures. It is estimated that about 70% of the information system implementation has actually failed (Kim et al., 2006). While the successful investment on IT can lead to a high productivity improvement, the failed system implementation may raise undesirable results such as financial loss and dissatisfaction between users. Therefore, it seems necessary to conduct a study why people try to avoid implementing IT. However in relation to the introduction and use of IT, most of studies up to now have been based on the IT acceptance theory. These studies have only focused on the positive perspectives why users accept IT rather than having a focus on the negative perspectives why people try to avoid IT.
For the successful introduction and use of IT, a large number of studies in relation to the information system (IS) have been focused on the information technology acceptance (TAM). However as IT provides the rich contents and convenient user interfaces, the importance of usefulness and easiness that are the key elements of IT is gradually weakened. Rather if we consider the adverse effect of informationization, it may be more meaningful to look into the factors of information technology threat. For example, it is to suggest the avoidance motives of individual information technology due to the adverse functions of informationization such as danger of cyber terrorism, virus damage, hacking, exposure of personal information, information gap, and other cyber crimes. Of course as for the method of reducing these malicious IT threats, the existing IT acceptance theory can be applied in the perspective of accepting the IT security measures (safeguarding IT) such as anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Actually, a number of IS researchers have conducted this kind of studies and many people seem to view the acceptance of security IT as the avoidance of malicious IT. However, the powerful theoretical and practical proofs show that there is a fundamental difference between the behaviors of acceptance and avoidance (Carver and White 1994; Elliot and Covington 2001; Elliot 2006).
Accordingly, this study intends not only to establish the definition of the factors such as perceived threat, IT appropriation, IT avoidance that no many studies have been conducted yet but also to develop the tools that can measure them effectively. Eventually, the purpose of this study is to explain about the cognitive process of appropriation and avoidance of IT through coping behavior, when users perceive IT threats.