Interpreting Institute Culture Dynamics of Technology Adoption: A Downscaling Dynamic Model

This study proposed a dynamic model of organizational technology adoption within a school institute culture. We described an implementation of a nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model based on a downscaling scheme that can project the cultural factors of the institute onto a teacher's implementation behavior. To reveal the dynamics of cultural evolution, we modeled the interactions within the institute's organization by incorporating extra dependencies and downscaling variables into the underlying process of cultural change. We applied an analysis scheme to the nine-semester e-textbook usage of a primary school and gain insight into teachers' technology adoption from a cultural perspective. We identified three states that represented the collective adoption contexts to examine how exogenous variables influence both the organization-scale context dynamics and the individual-scale implementation changes. The results showed that the effect of exogenous variables, especially external factors, varied between contexts and scales. The school's norm was shown to affect organizational adoption culture. Teachers were sensitive to the adopted context, as they are inclined to adjust their usage to meet preexisting norms. Interventions such as seminars initiated by the teachers' community were observed to cause a more long-term effect on the movement of the culture to an active context. Moreover, our research provided evidence that an organization can achieve more efficacy from teachers' involvement in a high degree of cooperation in in-class experiences.