Title: Cultural drivers of nascent smartphone use: peeling the layers of the socio-economic onion

Authors: David M. Simmonds; Russell P. Haines

Addresses: College of Business Administration, Savannah State University, Savannah, Georgia 31404, USA ' Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia 23529, USA

Abstract: The uses of smartphones for economically motivated activities, are examined against Hofstede dimensions of culture using six macro-economic indicators and six ratios of smartphone-use for life-style activities. Results suggest that this technological extension to the human hand is mirrored, sometimes literally as a reverse image, in the socio-economic soul of a country. This study also exposes a third layer to people's behaviour - lying deeper than and contradicting some cultural expectations. Some top layer relationships materialised as hypothesised, between uncertainty-avoidance and entrepreneurship and product-search/product-purchase, imports and reading-news/watching-TV, long-term-orientation and population-age. Running deeper and counter to expectations, were relationships between female-businesses and femininity, GINI and product-purchasing/finance-activities, imports and restraint. Overall, smartphones appear to give users greater freedom to express themselves in a layered, more sophisticated manner. This paper explores the cultural factors which may affect mass adoption in new markets for ubiquitous computing, addressing the vagaries of culturally dissimilar marketplaces.

Keywords: smartphones; mobile technology; ubiquitous computing; GDP; economics; Hofstede; culture; society; social media; lifestyle.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSHC.2020.111195

International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing, 2020 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.317 - 338

Received: 02 Mar 2020
Accepted: 23 Jul 2020
Published online: 12 Nov 2020 *

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