Edwin Semmeley

New Technologies in China. An ambivalent impact on managerial control procedures Edwin Semmeley

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 incre