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Mobile usage dictated by early adopters?

From an article in the Wall Street Journal, April 25th:

One reason U.S. cellphone habits are more utilitarian is that the gadgets caught on first with executives who needed to stay in touch. Some Americans turn on their cellphones only in emergencies. In the U.S., "the cellphone is an inferior version of what you already have at home and work," says anthropologist Mimi Ito, of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Japan's Keio University.

It's impossible to predict exactly how cellphone culture will develop in the U.S. But in Asia, young people have been the drivers. Cellphones were adopted early on in Japan by girls living in cramped households, because they lacked other private communication, such as personal telephones and Internet access.

And I suppose in Europe we partly have the utilitarian business person but also the young early adopters, who took up text messaging.

The article is mainly about mobile advertising, and how it has been a big success in Asia because mobile phone habits have been influenced by youthful early adopters. The author says another advantage is that in Asia people don't mind thumb typing text messages but Americans cannot be persuaded to do so (yet?). Also that Japan led the phone text revolution because of the taboo on talking on phones. It seems that advertisers are not giving up on the US market however.

The telegraph and the internet

Nice quotation from George Orwell blogged by Tom Hume, which led me to look it up in my Orwell anthologies, and so will quote it in full myself:

The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative...The one time empire-builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape...From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration.

'The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius', 19 February 1941

I bet there are plenty of Japanese expatriates working for Japanese companies overseas who feel similarly stifled by the way that e-mail now forces them to involve the Japanese headquarters in every decision.

Cultural influences on mobile data services

A paper that exactly deals with my area of interest - A Qualitative Cross-National Study of Cultural Influences on Mobile Data Service Design by Boreum Choi, Inseong Lee, Jinwoo Kim and Yunsuk Jeon, of Yonsei University in Korea and University of Helsinki (link to pdf). Summarised by Mark Frauenfelder on TheFeature.

First interesting statement:
"It should also be noted that, as use of mobile data services has spread globally,cultural factors have had a stronger effect on their use than on the use of traditional stationary Internet applications. This is because mobile devices are designed to interface with wireless networks that operate only in local areas, whereas devices that access the stationary Internet are globally uniform."

I suppose a PC is a PC wherever you go but I'm still pondering on this one. Is it the device that dictates the use of mobile data services? The interface is something else surely. Or should one regard them as a whole? And Sharp and other Japanese mobile device manufacturers are trying to come up with devices that can be used globally. Is this just a neutral way of saying that mobile applications are more culturally specific because Microsoft Windows has not achieved world domination in mobile applications (yet)? Or are they trying to say that the devices are designed with the local content on local wireless networks in mind - which is true up till now - although Vodafone are trying to be global in network, device and interface . I found that in Japan it was a bit of everything - everyone in the supply chain (browser suppliers, handset manufacturers, operators, content and application providers) worked together, so it was rather difficult to say who influenced who or determined what.

I like the term they have borrowed that technologies and online services are 'cultural amplifiers'.

The authors provide some useful summaries of other research. Apparently in a comparative survey of Chinese and American software developers, the Chinese developers performed better within an iconic or pictorial mode whereas their American counterparts were more successful in an alphanumerical mode. Which would tie in with their cultures being characterised as high context and low context respectively. Similarly, another survey showed that German mobile phone users prioritized clearly written and comprehensive user manuals whereas Chinese users cared more about the quality of pictorial information.

Some other research on website design showed that high uncertainty avoidance countries prefer restricted options and simple controls, while low uncertainty avoidance countries prefer multiple options and complex controls.

They interviewed 24 people in Korea, Japan and Finland, eight from each country, which they admit is rather few. The Japanese were a mix of students and housewives whereas the Koreans also included some business people. The Finns were mostly students with one housewife and one systems engineer. They identified 52 attributes of mobile data services and related them to Hofstede's four cultural dimensions. They asked the interviewees to download ringtones and play them, download and play a game, reserve a movie ticket and read sports news.

Overall one attribute was mentioned by all participants, which was 'minimal steps or keystrokes', in order to save time. I guess this is why the researchers concluded that all the participants are monochronic rather than polychronic. The researchers wrongly say that Edward T. Hall classifies Europeans as polychronic and Asian as monochronic. Hall actually distinguishes between Northern Europeans (monochronic) and Southern Europeans (polychronic). Asians are usually considered as being more polychronic. Hall says Japanese are polychronic at work, when they are taking group relations into account, but monochronic outside of work. So you would expect the Finnish to be monochronic and also that the Japanese, who were not at work as they were students and housewives, to be more monochronic. Koreans are usually classified as polychronic, so it is interesting that they are not when using mobile data services.

The researchers also found that Korean and Japanese participants had a greater tendency than the Finnish to avoid the ambiguous and reject unusual ideas, which confirms the Hofstede finding that Japanese and Koreans have high uncertainty avoidance compared to the Finnish. Japanese and Korean participants preferred to have secondary and unhyped information about site content whereas Finnish participants thought such information was useless, including rankings.

I found it surprising that the Japanese participants came out as individualistic along with the Finnish. They say this is because although the Japanese participants preferred a wide variety of options for content (eg difficulty level for games, chord for ringtone, seat selection for movies) due to uncertainty avoidance they did not like a wide variety of content - lots of games, movie theaters, ringtones to choose from because it interfered with individualistic goals. I am not at all sure this is an indicator of individualism. You might say that being an individualist means wanting a variety to choose from, because you believe your tastes cannot be met by a limited choice? I wonder whether this kind of judgement is not coloured by the Korean researchers own collectivist tendencies?

The high context versus low context conclusions seem a lot more unarguable. The Japanese and Korean participants preferred to have an iconic menu style and a variety of font colours and sizes, whereas the Finns disliked this, preferring a mono colour, text oriented screen.

Structuration theory (ooh)

A highbrow research paper from Geoff Walsham, Research Professor of Management Studies at the Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University has been sitting in my in-tray for a while, but I promise not for the four years since it was published!

I read it a while ago but did not blog it as it kicks off with a discussion of structuration theory as applied to globalization and Information and Communication Technology, which I was reluctant to try to sum up in a blog entry, but here goes.

Structuration theory was developed by Anthony Giddens, a sociologist of some repute. The idea is that human action and social structure are a duality rather than a dualism. So rather than seeing human action taking place within the context of the 'outside' constraints of social structure (a dualism), action and structure are seen as two aspects of the same whole (a duality). Giddens says 'structure exists only as memory traces, the organic basis of human knowledgeability, and as instantiated in action'. So structure is seen as rules of behaviour and the ability to deploy resources that exist in the human mind itself, rather than outside.

According to Giddens, contradictions do not inevitably breed conflict if the actors in the situation are able and motivated to act on them. Conflict occurs if interests are threatened.

Walsham looks at three case studies, including one looking at a technological partnership between two global players in the electronics industry, one Japanese, one British. Attempts were made to get the British and Japanese engineers to work together and share knowledge, but these were largely unsuccessful.

Structure and culture differences:
- the nature of engineering knowledge as embedded and potentially encodable (UK) versus embodied and encultured (Japan)
- group work and knowledge sharing through sequential stages and document transfer (UK) or through intensive interaction in multifunctional teams (Japan)

ICT role:
Computer systems embody systems of meaning and norms of behaviour more closely aligned to British engineers' structural attitudes
They can thus be used as a political resource to complain of lack of rigour on the part of the Japanese engineers
And can also be used to advance the counter position - that much know-how cannot be captured by computer systems

This led to conflict which was not resolved and abandoned in favour of a compartmentalised approach to later projects. They found it very difficult to abandon their own cultural style, as it would have undermined their own position as knowledgeable engineers based on their own tradition.

Walsham concludes that the notion that globalization has brought with it cultural homogeneity is simplistic. It can even be argued that some elements of globalisation, such as increased cross cultural contact can mean that differences between cultures are now more visible and important.

His recommendations for achieving more effective cross-cultural collaboration include being aware and acting on cultural preferences for particular media, linked to different ways of working and interacting. Interaction may be particularly dependent on face to face interaction.

He cites a study by Maznevski and Chudoba where they found that members of a team in an East Asian site preferred a sequence of a faxed agenda for discussion, informal discussions over the phone, then faxed confirmation of decisions made during the discussions. However the non-Asian team members made no effort to accommodate these preferences.

So, not too painful, and, I'm wondering, as I often find with these avowedly academic papers, if the author has found it necessary to jemmy fancy theories into practical, almost banal findings.

China update

A couple of nuggets from an article by David Kirkpatrick for Fortune magazine re China:

China has 350 million cellphone users, according to Information Industry Minister Wang Xudong, which is more than any other country in the world.

100 million Chinese are already online. It recently passed Japan, to become the second largest population online behind the U.S.

The most popular song in China recently has been a silly romantic ditty entitled, "Mice Love Rice." It originated on a blog. The once-anonymous singer-songwriter is now a national celebrity, and the song has been released commercially in both Mandarin and Cantonese. Four million Chinese now maintain blogs.

And I hope what Kirkpatrick says is true rather than wishful thinking:

"Attitudes in China about openness - an inevitable accompaniment to Internet growth - are changing."

one of those 'fun' foods that parents torture themselves and their children with in an attempt to get them to eat something other than cheesy wotsits.

Virtual teams

One piece of advice from an article in the Financial Times supplement on Business and Diversity from May 12 (subscription only, so no link) that I have been mulling over:

"Any good virtual team has a communication plan that includes weekly conference calls or e-mail check-ins, but with a virtual team where not everyone speaks English well, the regular report-ins should be in written mode rather than by telephone or conference call." Joanne Yates, a professor of management at MIT Sloan.

I've often tried to point out in my seminars that I think teleconferencing or videoconferencing is not a very effective way to communicate with Japanese colleagues but I have never gone so far as to suggest that report-ins should only be done by e-mail. Teleconferencing seems to be a fact of life in American multinationals, and Japanese people working in them have a resigned attitude to such communication mechanisms - it comes with the territory and they chose to work for an American multinational.

A director at a UK company I have been talking to recently says he communicates with his Japanese subordinate once a week by telephone in order to get updates from him. He says the Japanese person's English is 'OK' (which, given the tone of voice he said this in, I take it as British speak for not very good). I can't imagine him being happy me with me suggesting that he asks his Japanese subordinate to report in by e-mail each week instead. I have a gut feeling that British managers feel it is important to have a dialogue or at least the pretence of a dialogue with subordinates to feel that real communication has occurred. If I get the chance, I will talk to the Japanese subordinate about how he views these calls.

Prof Yates has a nice anecdote at the end of the article about an online conference between a group of US and Japanese executives working in the R&D unit of a Japanese company.

'A Japanese executive was putting text into a window for instant messaging when one of the Americans started asking questions in the middle of the presentation...that was not culturally familiar and required an instant response, which caused real problems. So [virtual communications] have a cultural element as well.'

Well quite.