Institutional Influences on Information Systems Security Innovations

This research investigates information security management as an administrative innovation. Although a number of institutional theories deal with information systems (IS) innovation in organizations, most of these institutional-centered frameworks overlook external economic efficiency and internal organizational capability in the presence of pressures of institutional conformity. Using Korea as the institutional setting, our research model posits that economic-based consideration will moderate the institutional conformity pressure on information security adoption while organization capability will influence the institutional confirmation of information security assimilation. The model is empirically tested using two-stage survey data from a field study of 140 organizations in Korea. The results indicate that in addition to institutional influences, our six proposed economic-based and organizational capability moderating variables all have significant influences on the degree of the adoption and assimilation of information security management. We conclude with implications for research in the area of organizational theory and the information security management literature, and for practices regarding how managers can factor into their information security planning the key implementation variables discovered in this study. The robust setting of the study in Korean firms allows us to generalize the theory to a new context and across cultures.