Information technology and business in the New Economy: The dimensions of culture, gender, and experience, and attitudes about eCommerce

Many authors argue that modern technology in this New Economy is causing a unification of society. Others take the opposite stand, viewing global factors such as national culture very important to the success of international information technology (IT) and information systems (IS). Research indicates that relayed factors such as gender and previous behavior may also play important roles in the use and acceptance of IT. This paper examined each of these by using electronic commerce as the common technology.; Such research is more complex than research conducted in a strictly domestic setting because global research involves a diversity of modes of operation, a wide variety of environmental contexts, linguistics and translation problems, diversity in cultural values that result in differences in perception and sensitivity to disclosure of information, lack of available secondary data, high costs in collecting primary data, collecting and coordinating issues, difficulty in establishing comparability and equivalence of data collected in different contexts, and compatibility of the data.; This research provides significant data on identifying the areas and issues important to the success of global eCommerce, and shows the impact of culture, gender and previous behavior upon those issues.; To determine if there are differences in attitude about technology in general and eCommerce in particular, among the independent variables of culture groups, genders and those having experienced an eCommerce activity, 195 students from the US, the UK and Greece were given surveys allowing them to express their opinions on several important issues. These issues included National Control, Privacy Cost, Property Rights, Access Rights, Internet Infrastructure and Consumer Preferences.; Using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), sufficient evidence was found to reject the null hypotheses (alpha = .05) and conclude that there are differences in attitude about eCommerce among culture groups and those with previous eCommerce experience. Further, this research identified areas of similarities and differences among the independent variables. This research also found support for several studies indicating the importance of culture and experience on attitudes about technology.