Innovating under pressure: Adopting digital technologies in social care organizations during the COVID-19 crisis

Sanaz Kateb, Rebecca C. Ruehle, David P. Kroon, Elco van Burg and Max Huber

Technovation, 2022, vol. 115, issue C

Abstract: To provide ongoing support for vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, social care organizations had to shift abruptly to e-health solutions. Qualitative data from three cases illustrate that, more than a year into the pandemic, those adoptions of digital technologies developed differently; the current study aims to shed light on the processes that lead to such differences. Notably, the first organization resisted the large-scale use of digital technologies; the second faced intra-organizational disagreement about the role of digital technology for care provision; and the third organization struggled but managed a broader, more successful adoption of digital technology. The multiple case study findings contribute to extant literature, by (1) detailing the digital innovation process, focusing on the crucial adoption process for digital technology; (2) demonstrating that champions and a shared vision can both enable and constrain the adoption of digital technologies in crisis situations; (3) emphasizing the importance of individual members’ professional identities for determining adoption of digital technologies; and (4) reflecting on the conscious use of transformation practices, even in the ad hoc setting of adopting digital technology during a crisis.

Keywords: Digitalization; Identity; Vision; E-health; Technology acceptance; Covid-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497222000839
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:techno:v:115:y:2022:i:c:s0166497222000839

DOI: 10.1016/j.technovation.2022.102536

Access Statistics for this article

Technovation is currently edited by Jonathan Linton

More articles in Technovation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().