Human Factors: A Cultural Analysis

3.3.5 Cultural influences

Alsaif (2013) has pointed out and discussed more about the human factors. He emphasized that there is an urgent need to investigate about the human factors such as cultural and social elements in developing countries in term of e-government services. Because, he has shown that technical and management factors related to e-government adoption have been explored more, however less attention has paid to human factors. Hence, the significance of culture is obvious and social and culture makes influence more on lives of people in developing countries. Nurdin et al. (2010) has shown the importance of culture as a success factor for adoption and use new technology systems and on the other hand, they indicate if the cultural

Hofstede (1991) has defined culture as reflection of humans due to their own abilities of creativity and works shaped by literature, education and art. In other words, it implies commonly accepted patterns of thinking and feelings of humans. Accordingly, in a particular society, things (good or bad) accumulated from generation to generations represent insights of the culture. Hofstede (1980) has given a definition from a different angle as an accumulated programming of the human mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another and he considered human body as hardware and it is equal to all humans around the world but from the side of human brain, he considered human brain as software which control the hardware. So that, human brain is different from person to person or from society to society or even country wise like software differ from hardware to hardware. Culture distinguishes not only group of people (society or societies) but also organizations, industries and professions (Martinsons et al., 2009). For a long period, those people come to agreements for certain things, share common things, build up norms and collect all those and demonstrate their history. By doing so, history itself represents the accumulated culture. People in a same culture act as same way and take decisions in similar manner for certain situations. Hence, behavior of human could be better understood by their representing

(2011) have done an empirical study related to the national cultural impact on citizen adoption of e-government services. In their study, it has been considered the well- known TAM model and has extended by additional construct of culture as external variable to TAM. Hofstede’s two cultural dimensions which are uncertainty avoidance and power distance have used as dimensions of culture. Their results indicate that two cultural dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance have made a significant influence towards the intention to adopt and use of e-government services in Jordan. Further other three cultural dimensions of individualism, masculinity and long term orientation have not been considered in their study as their impact is not noticeable level. The same findings can be identified in the study of Warkentin et al. (2002). Their results also reveal that there is a significant influence from the uncertainty avoidance as well as power distance to adoption and use of e-government services.

Akkaya et al. (2012) noted that cultural characteristics of the nation make influences towards the adoption behavior. So that, they emphasizes that it needs to have more studies to understand the adoption behavior of the people in different countries and posit that national culture make influence on the perception of users, hence users may take decisions whether accept and use of new technological services (Srite & Karahanna, 2006). Moreover they highlighted importance