Some Evidence of Cultural Influences on IT Use

Based on the analytical framework developed in the previous chapter, this chapter looks for some empirical evidence in our data for national cultural influences on IT use. As already discussed, data has been gathered regarding two types of organisational IT use – CIU and IIU – to examine the broad hypothesis that national culture affects IT use. In this chapter, data on the two patterns of IT use are reported respectively. National culture predicts managerial preferences for IT use in each factory. I look for empirical evidence for different patterns of IT use from the data on managerial preference in terms of CIU and IIU, firstly between British factories and Japanese factories; then, together with data on JFB, I examine a situation where JFB can be situated, that is either closer to the pattern of British factories/Japanese factories or between the two. As explained in Chapter 3, CIU has been defined to consist of three factors: the concentration of important information at the top; top-down information flow; and simple job design. In an organisation in which the degree of CIU is high, hierarchical control of information is presumed. It is possible to presume that a traditional Taylorist management, which serves for avoiding uncertainties at the shop-floor, requires the concentration of information at the top management level, so that information is distributed via the organisational hierarchy resulting in a simple