New Technologies in China. An ambivalent impact on managerial control procedures (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Industrial Management, grade: 90, Tongji University (School of Economics), language: English, abstract: In the current context of technological revolution, research on technology
acceptance is critical. The insights about how organizations successfully implement and
manage the adoption and use of information technology are of a highly practical value.
With globalization and considering the increasing weight of China in world economy, it
is necessary to study IT adoption in non-western cultures and avoid any ethnocentrism
bias. The main aim of this study is to enrich the understanding of IT acceptance in China
and of its impacts both on individual and on organizations. Indeed, most of existing
studies are focusing on the western world. The various impacts of new technologies are
established based on the existing literature on technology acceptance and on culture of IT
management and are divided in 4 categories (intensification of work, stress, blurring of
work/life balance, blurring of source of authority). To understand the last impact, the
blurring of authority, the study is basing itself on the work of the French historian of
ideas and social theorist Michel Foucault and his concept of Bio-power. The study is
based on a quantitative approach with the implementation of a survey on 300 Chinese
workers. Cronbach's alpha and correlation coefficients were used to validate the model
and the hypotheses, notably to validate the aggregated variable on technology awareness.
Last, this study will draw comparisons between the findings and existing studies, and
discuss practical implications of the results from the stand point of a manager. This study
is linked to Change Management and could be directly used to facilitate the
implementation of a project whose aim is to increase the utilization of new technological
devices in a company.