A REPRESENTATION THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON THE REPURPOSING OF PERSONAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR WORK-RELATED TASKS
In a paper in the Journal of the AIS, my team probes drivers of why people move technologies from home to work use.
Individuals often blur the line between technologies used for personal means and those used to complete work-related tasks. The increasing level of capabilities offered by personal technologies presents opportunities for repurposing them to accomplish work-related tasks. With guidance from representation theory, we describe how cross-context representational fidelity predicts repurposing intentions across domains of use (e.g., personal to work-related). An empirical study of 311 full-time employees demonstrates that congruence between prior technology use and potential work use increases an individualís belief that technology can be useful for work purposes. Furthermore, we show that, in repurposing situations, usefulness is also influenced by an individualís confidence in using the technology on his or her work device(s). These findings, among others, shed new light on our understanding of the influence of experience on repurposing technologies for use in the professional domain.
The paper was led by Jim Burleson (Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo) and co-authored with Varun Grover (University of Arkansas) and Heshan Sun (University of Oklahoma).
Recommended citation: Burleson, J., Grover, V., Thatcher, J.B., and Sun, H. (2021) “Technology Repurposing: When Technology moves from Home to Work.” Journal of the AIS. 22(6): 1556-1589.