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Small Businesses Encounters With Information Technology, Liliana Lopez Jimenez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation advances the concept of IT encountering, defined as the process whereby individuals pay attention, interpret and respond to cues suggesting changes to IT, in ways that appear sensible to them, and it studies IT encountering in the context of small businesses.

I review the literatures on organizational IT adoption and IT selection, and conclude that these literatures have relied on assumptions which leave unattended important aspects of the process leading to choice: the adoption literature presupposes the saliency and significance of a focal technology to a decision maker, and the IT selection literature generally assumes that suitable IT …