ENTER2017 eTourism Conference presentation

1. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 1
Technology Adoption by Tourism
Operators in Australia and Brazil:
An Institutional Theory Perspective
Ulrike Gretzel, University of Southern California, USA
Luiz Mendes Filho, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Márcia Lobianco, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Marisol Alsonso Vazquez, University of Queensland, Australia
Nina Mistilis, University of New South Wales, Australia

2. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 2
Organizational Adoption of ICTs
• Important and recurring theme in tourism research
(Buhalis & Law, 2008)
• Only some research on industry-level diffusion
(Murphy, Schegg & Olaru, 2006; Scaglione, Schegg &
Trabichet, 2013)
• Most existing literature focused on Technology
Acceptance Model and some on Technology-
Organization-Environment framework
(Gibbs, Gretzel & Noorani, 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Racherla
& Hu, 2008)

3. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 3
Overview
• Institutional theory seeks to understand the
impact of external factors on organizational
behaviours, focusing on the institutional
environment in which organizations operate and
to which they must conform in order to gain
acceptance and legitimacy (Weerakkody, Dwivedi
& Irani, 2009).
• provides alternative explanations to autonomous
decision-making and challenges the dogma of
efficiency (Greenwood et al., 2008)

4. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 4
Institutional Theory
• third big theory of organizational technology
adoption and used extensively in the information
systems literature (Oliveira & Martins, 2010)
• has only been adopted to a very limited extent in
tourism (e.g. de Grosbois, 2016) and especially
not by the literature pertaining to technology
adoption in tourism and hospitality organizations
(Gyau & Stringer, 2011; Ali, Cullen & Toland,
2013).

5. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 5
Premises
• institutional environments are characterised by rules,
regulations and belief systems and exercise influence over
the entities within them (Weerakkody et al., 2009).
• to be able to function within the institutional environment,
organizations need to adapt.
• organizations change their behaviours to not only seek
competitive advantages but also to seek legitimization
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).
• As a result, organizations not only make technology adoption
decisions for economic reasons but likely (or even more so)
also in light of institutional pressures and their need to be
recognized by major stakeholders and peers.

6. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 6
Institutional Isomorphism
• Suggests that organizational fields follow an
evolutionary path that leads from diversity to
homogeneity (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).
• Such trends have also been described as
bandwagon effects in the technology adoption
literature (Murphy et al., 2003).
• DiMaggio and Powell describe three main forces
or mechanisms that encourage institutional
isomorphism: mimetic, coercive and normative
forces.

7. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 7
Mimetic Forces
• Mimetic forces come into play when there
is ambiguity, which is often the case in the
context of emerging ICTs.
• Not able to determine themselves whether
a technology will be advantageous,
organizations are likely to look at the
leaders in their field to identify best
practices.

8. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 8
Coercive Forces
• Coercive mechanisms result from pressures
exercised by regulatory forces or powerful
players on which others in the
organizational field depend.
• Example: Google Mobilegeddon

9. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 9
Normative Forces
• Normative pressures emerge from
standards communicated through training,
education and certification.
• The more professionalism there is in an
organizational field as evident by the
establishment of associations, the more
likely such norms exist.

10. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 10
Research Objective
• Gyau and Stringer (2011) identified institutional isomorphism as
a promising concept for gaining better insights into technology
adoption among tourism operators by providing additional
explanations for adoption behaviours besides the factors
traditionally considered.
• Goal:
explore institutional isomorphism in the tourism industry in the
context of email, Website, social media and e-Commerce
adoption
• Context: tourism operators in two similar tourism regions in
two different countries, namely Brazil and Australia

11. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 11
NE Brazil vs. NE Australia

12. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 12
Destination Products & Institutional
Contexts
• Striving beach destinations – operators
concentrated along coasts
• Strong domestic tourism
• Destination marketing organizations
• Strong industry associations – similar levels
of professionalization
• Laid back

13. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 13
Methodology - Brazil
• The tourism operators of the three main industry associations (i.e.,
ABIH, ABRASEL, and ABAV) of the four most important Northeast
states in terms of tourism (i.e., Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte,
Bahia and Ceará) were selected to participate in an online survey.
• In total, 1,616 emails were sent to tourism operators, of which only 96
were undeliverable. The online survey fieldwork took part in the
period 12 July to 25 August 2016.
• A total of 109 responses were received (resulting in a response rate of
7.2%). However, some organizations were represented twice through
different departments and some respondents only completed the first
few questions. After deleting double and incomplete responses, the
resulting final sample was 79.

14. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 14
Methodology - Australia
• Drawn from a study conducted in 2013 that used the exact same questions
and sampled operators from the same business categories (Tourism
Research Australia, 2013).
• Some of the tourism operators in Australia are members of an organization
called the Australian Tourism Datawarehouse (ATDW) that provides training
and digital tools. Since this adds a different institutional layer, only non-
members were selected.
• The Queensland portion of the sample (which most closely resembles the
Brazilian sample in terms of the type of tourism destinations and products
offered) included 232 operators.
• Previous research has identified considerable differences in technology
adoption across tourism sectors and depending on organizational size
(Gretzel, Kennedy-Eden & Mistilis, 2014). Thus, a sample of 84 Queensland
tourism operators that closely resembled the Brazilian sample in terms of
first sector and then size distributions was drawn. This parallels the
approach adopted by Gibbs and Kraemer (2004).

15. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 15
Issue: Time lag
• Focus on mature technologies
• Likelihood of Australian operator who
didn’t have a website in 2013 to adopt one
between 2014-2016 was deemed very
small

16. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 16
Sample Characteristics
Sector Total
%
<
5
5 -
9 10 - 19 20 -
199 ≥ 200 Don’t
know
NE Brazil
Hotels 53.2 6 3 3 22 7 1
Restaurants 24.1 2 0 4 13 0 0
Tours 17.7 8 4 0 2 0 0
Transport 5.1 4 0 0 0 0 0
Total % 25.3 8.9 8.9 46.8 8.9 1.3
Queensland
Hotels 52.4 18 7 4 6 8 1
Restaurants 27.4 2 0 4 14 3 0
Tours 16.7 2 5 1 2 3 1
Transport 3.6 0 0 2 1 0 0
Total % 26.2 14.3 13.1 27.4 16.7 2.4

17. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 17
Results - Email
• The findings show identical patterns in terms of e-
mail adoption, with 96.4% of Australian tourism
operators and 96.2% of Brazilian operators
indicating that they have a corporate email.
• Not 100%
• Laggards constitute an interesting case from an
institutional theory perspective as they very
successfully refuse to succumb to the pressures of
their respective environments.

18. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 18
Results – Website Adoption
• 79.8% of Australian tourism operators and
82.7% of Brazilian tourism operators have
their own Website.
Feature Queensland NE Brazil
Description of products/services 97.0 91.8
Links to company’s social media sites 59.7 63.9
Links to local/regional/national DMOs 37.3 29.5
Photo gallery 89.6 85.2
Web-based inquiry form 83.6 82.0
User-generated contents 41.8 47.5
Online videos 35.8 29.5
Maps 70.1 59.0

19. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 19
Results Website Use
• Gibbs and Kraemer (2004) suggest that patterns also need
to be looked at beyond the simple adoption/non-adoption
dichotomy and include use.
• Similar patterns across regions but no isomorphism within
Update frequency Queensland NE Brazil
Less often than once a year 4.9 6.3
Once a year 11.5 8.3
2-12 times a year 32.8 31.3
2-4 times a month 26.2 27.1
2-7 times a week 14.8 14.6
Several times a day 9.8 12.5

20. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 20
Results – Website Optimization
• The Australian organizations indicated low levels of mobile
optimization of their websites (only 35% had an optimized
website, 23.3% had a separate mobile site, and 41.7% had
neither).
• For the Brazilian sample, the percentages were 85.2%, 3.7%
and 11.1%, respectively.
• While the Australian data was collected in 2013, the
Brazilian data was collected after Google’s Mobilegeddon in
2015. Given the otherwise similar Website adoption
patterns, it is reasonable to assume strong coercive
pressure by Google leading to this outcome.

21. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 21
Results – Social Media
• No isomorphism besides Facebook but
similar diffusion in both regions.
Social media presence Queensland NE Brazil
Company blog
10.8 11.9
Facebook
98.3 95.9
Twitter
31.0 37.8
YouTube
25.9 27.0

22. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 22
Results – e-Commerce
• Large majority of Queensland tourism operators (90.5%) and NE Brazilian
tourism operators (84.8%) take bookings for their products and services.
• Of those tourism operators who take bookings and have a website, most allow
email booking requests from their website (Queensland: 88.5%; NE Brazil:
80.8%).
• With regards to checking availability of products/services on their websites,
the majority of these NE Brazilian (59.5%) and Queensland (65.6%) tourism
operators allow customers to check both price and availability. Nevertheless,
a considerable portion of these tourism operators in both tourism regions do
support neither price nor availability checks (NE Brazil: 34.7%; Queensland:
26.2%).
• Of the tourism operators that allow reservations and have a website, 55.7% (in
Queensland) and 70.0% (in NE Brazil) offer instant confirmation bookings. And
of those who offer instant confirmation bookings, the majority (76.5% in
Queensland and 60% in Brazil) take online payments.

23. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 23
Discussion
• Exploratory study tells a striking and surprising tale of similarity
in two distant yet structurally equivalent destinations.
• DiMaggio and Powell (1983) describe structural equivalence but
also connectedness as fundamental characteristics of an
organizational field headed towards homogenization. Palacios-
Marqués, Merigó and Soto-Acosta (2015)’s research on
hospitality firms in Spain suggests that the use of online social
networks increases the innovation capacity of firms.
• Our research proposes that this happens on a global scale,
leading to increased organizational isomorphism in tourism
around the world.

24. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 24
Value of Institutional Theory
Perspective
• Isomorphism seems to be even stronger across regions than
within. Organizations might mimic the world leaders in their
specific sectors or experience pressures differently depending on
their structural position in a destination network.
• Almost complete homogenization exists in terms of email,
Website and, interestingly, also Facebook adoption. If Websites
are adopted, they are very similar in terms of basic Web 1.0
features offered but not Web 2.0 integration.
• While some of this can be explained by considering the maturity
of technologies, homogenization related to Facebook (especially
in contrast to Twitter) cannot be illuminated with research
focused on technology aspects and organizational
characteristics.

25. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 25
Org. Resistance
• Although the results show astonishing isomorphism
across the two samples of tourism operators, they
also show that within each of the samples there are
organizations that resist isomorphic pressures.
• Warrant a closer look from an institutional theory
point of view as there are currently no indications
as to how and why they can legitimize their
existence.

26. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 26
Future Research
• Emphasizes the need to understand organizational
embeddedness in a particular industry, technology
adoption related norms, and the existence and role of
players that can exercise coercive pressures.
• Only compared two tourism regions and did not have large
enough samples to test for industry sector effects. Thus,
there is a great need to extend the research to other areas
and also sample regions for heterogeneity in terms of their
tourism products and industry structures.
• Ongoing study in Minas Gerais, Brazil and planned follow-up
study in Australia.
• Challenge of industry samples in general & in tourism.

27. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 27
Conclusion
• The significance of this study lies in offering an alternative
view on technology adoption.
• It draws attention to the immense complexity of the
phenomenon and meso- and macro-level influences that are
often neglected by technology acceptance and diffusion of
innovation studies.
• Institutional theory has been widely adopted as a framework
in other disciplines and continues to enlighten many areas of
organizational and consumer studies (Vargo & Lusch, 2016). It
is not clear why Gyau and Stringer’s (2011) call to more widely
use it to understand technology adoption in tourism and
hospitality has remained unanswered.

28. ENTER 2017 Research Track Slide Number 28
Heaps thanks!
Muito obrigado!