Understanding the diffusion and adoption of mobile IT across social worlds: Experiences from Danish Elderly Home Care

Diffusion and adoption of IT innovations (such as mobile IT) in health care
organizations is a dynamic process of change involving multiple
stakeholders with competing interests, varying commitments and values.
Reporting from a case study of a mobile-based IT innovation in the field of
elderly home care in Denmark, this paper reveal how diverging views and
understandings of the new technology among heterogeneous stakeholders
has led to conflicting interests which were at times difficult to resolve. By
Using notions of trajectories, social worlds and boundary objects, we show
how mobile IT facilitated and mediated negotiation and collaboration
among various stakeholders at one time and become source of tension and
conflicts at other times between different social worlds. Indeed, the
trajectory of mobile IT adoption was of a top-down approach and the use
of the new technology interfered with important aspects of home care
practices creating resistance among the health care personal. Extant
literature on mobile IT diffusion and adoption in health care has
predominantly taken a factor-orientated perspective and with little
emphasis on the environment in which organizations are embedded.
Instead, we propose the social worlds approach as a promising theoretical
lens to accommodate the tensions, conflicts, and negotiations involved in
the process of diffusing and adopting IT innovations in health care settings.