A Critical Review of Theories and Models of Technology Adoption and Acceptance in Information System Research

1. Introduction

The decision of how and why people adopt or reject a particular technology has been a prominent topic in the field of information system (IS), marketing and social science (Tarhini, Hone, & Liu, 2013; Venkatesh, Thong & Xu, 2012; Benbasat & Barki, 2007). For the last three decades, researchers have aimed to understand, predict and explain the factors that influence the adoption of technology at individual as well as organizational levels (Abbasi et al, 2015; Abu Tair & Abu-Shanab, 2014; Venkatesh & Zhang, 2010). Other behaviour theories move away from the individual to focus either on behaviour itself, or relationships between behaviour, individuals and the social and physical environments in which they occur. As a result, numerous technology acceptance theories and models have been developed and used to exploit the determinants and mechanisms of users’ adoption decisions and behaviours. These models include: The Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989; Davis, Bagozzi & Warshaw, 1989) and the extended TAM (Venkatesh & Davis, 2000), the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) (Venkatesh et al., 2003), the Motivational Model (Davis, Bagozzi & Warshaw, 1992), the model combining TAM and the Theory of Planned Behavior (Taylor & Todd, 1995c), the Innovation Diffusion Theory (Rogers, 1995) and the Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986).