RFID Acceptance amongst customers: A cross-cultural framework.

Although globalisation is fostering the use of ubiquitous technology little attention has been devoted to customers’ readiness to adopt, willingness to use, or evaluation of technology from a cross-cultural perspective. In marketing studies for instance, a wide range of models have been developed to predict users’ acceptance of technology. The “theory of reasoned action” for example employs four constructs to explain technology use or adoption behaviour – behavioural attitude, subjective norm, intention to use and actual use (Shih & Fang, 2004). By contrast, the “technology acceptance model” places more emphasis on the perceived usefulness of the technology and the perceived ease of use to explain usage behaviour (Bagozzi et al., 1992). Although all of these models implicitly acknowledge that technology adoption is likely to be largely a matter of “cultural affinity” (Phillips et al., 1994), a more explicit articulation of this issue is still missing. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by introducing a conceptual framework aimed at assessing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) adoption amongst customers from a cross-cultural perspective. In particular, drawing on a broader research project on RFID aimed at supporting intelligent business networking and innovative consumer services, the development of the framework is informed by the authors’ work in the preparation of a RFID based application at an established grocery retailer for short life products. The paper endorses the view that customers’ Technology Readiness (TR) and Service Quality Assessment (SQA) should be jointly taken into account in order to accurately predict the perception and behaviour of customers from a cross-cultural perspective. On the one hand, customers’ TR framework (Parasuraman, 2000) allows the classification of customers into explorers, pioneers, sceptics, paranoids and laggards and provides valuable insights from a cross-cultural perspective (Parasuraman & Colby, 2001; Tiskriktis, 2004). Additionally, it also allows firms to identify innovative customers who are likely to be most helpful during new service technology development where the timing of adoption is a very challenging task for firms (Matthing et al., 2006). On the other hand, since customers’ evaluation of interactions with service based technology appears to be different from that in purely human service settings (Parasuraman et al., 2005) service quality must be evaluated within the context of technological interaction from a cross-cultural perspective. More precisely, SQA should focus on the extent to which the resulting consumer perception and behavior can affect the adoption of the technology (Lin and Hsieh, 2006). The paper offers a framework that provides a better understanding of TR and SQA from a cross-cultural perspective and that provides valuable insights on how to improve the “ergonomic match” (Ahasan & Imbeau, 2003) between users and service offering. This framework is evaluated in a context of an RFID enabled service. In demonstrating the application of our conceptual framework to the assessment of customers’ readiness to adopt, willingness to use, and evaluation of RFID technology and any consequent influence on customers’ behaviour, this study suggests that this cross-cultural framework may have broader applicability in the case of the assessment of customers’ response to other discontinuous and revolutionary technologies.