Categorization of Technologies: Insights from the Technology Acceptance Literature

Abstract

This study develops a technology category framework to enable the investigation of a possible moderating effect of technology type on adoption behavior by extracting and analyzing the technology descriptions from 950 papers covering over 20 years of technology acceptance research. We utilize both human judgment and statistical techniques by using the results of the manual sorting of technology descriptions by six individuals as input for a multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis to group them into hierarchical cluster structures. One of several potential cluster solutions is selected for further discussion along with its limitations and the future work it suggests