Attitudes toward Internet Adoption by Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME’s); A Cross Cultural Comparison of the Thai and British Experience

Abstract

For well over 40 years now change management has been an area on which managers and students of management have devoted much attention (1). Implicitly much of the rationale for the need to manage change within organisations has been the recognition of resistance to change being likely to exist within the workforce (2). Change management models though often have a lack of any cultural reference, being a “one size fits all” type of model which makes no reference to the cultural context in which the organization may be located. In a sense there ought to be no surprise in this as writers were generally looking at change management in the context of the cultures they were operating in, without feeling the need to make clear the cultural assumptions/paradigm that they were utilising.

 It is worth noting, though, that the implications of national culture and identity on the behaviours of individual’s have been the subject of much thorough study. Arguably the seminal writer here is Hofstede (3), and it is to his work that we refer/defer in this article. Hofstede identified certain key dimensions of values, which have then been researched and applied to respondents from over 70 nations. The results, in this case focussing only on Thailand and Britain, allow us to identify aspects of cultural values and use them to predict likely differing responses to facing up to certain situations.

 Here we utilise the analysis to predict likely differences in adopting the use of the internet in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME’s), and then go on to compare these predictions with surveys about this issue carried out simultaneously across samples of SME’s in Bangkok and Chesterfield in 2004. In doing this we hope to gain some insight into the extent to which Hofstede’s work, originating over 20 years ago, still has the ability to predict the effects of cultural differences which exist between countries.