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The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of connective action characterised by interconnection and personal communication on social media (SM) for participating in collective action in the physical world of social movements.

A research model is developed integrating different modes of connective action into the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) to investigate pathways to participating in offline collective action (CA) from an individual perspective. Following a survey design approach, data collected from 194 respondents in the background of Egypt's social movements are examined using partial least squares (PLS) path modelling and mediation analyses.

The authors' main results reveal that interactive socialisation (IS) on SM provides an important momentum for the user to internalise (consume) and externalise (share) content online from a social learning perspective. In terms of translating these activities to participating in offline CA, the authors find support for two independent causal chains: An “instrumental” chain building on content externalisation (CE) and efficacy considerations and an “obligatory” chain based on content internalisation (CI) and collective identity.

The authors' results highlight the individual-level origins of offline mobilisation in social movements, which are not only grounded in social-psychology, but also develop out of interrelated connective actions supporting social learning. Prior work has mainly conceptualised the value of SM in social movements for online political communication. The authors' conceptualisation is novel in terms of integrating online and offline behaviours with social-psychological perspectives and the application with primary data in a protest movement context that heavily relied on connective actions for offline mobilisation.

Drawing from the literature, the purpose of this paper is to offer an empirically validated framework for examining information technology (IT) readiness in small firms.

A conceptual framework of IT readiness for small firms is developed and validated empirically using a quantitative survey of 117 UK manufacturing small firms to identify distinct clusters of firms according to their states of IT readiness.

The survey responses are grouped according to three distinct profiles that display varying degrees of IT readiness depending upon their strategic motivation, IT processes, project management and technology complexity.

Prior studies examining IT readiness in small-and medium-sized enterprises have not offered a differentiated understanding of small firms that is grounded in quantitative data. The varying profiles of small firms discovered indicate potential paths of IT readiness which offers a basis for further research using longitudinal case studies.

Managerial motivation is not a sufficient condition for achieving IT readiness; it requires both strategic and operational capabilities that have significant implications for training and skills development in small firms. Understanding the level of IT readiness of their organisation can help managers identify areas needing improvement in their use of IT.

Findings suggest differentiated policy support is required for various small business clusters identified in the study.

The novelty of the conceptual model differs from the prior literature on IT readiness by explicitly recognising the potential effect of IT maturity on the capability of the firm to respond to opportunities in its external environment. The paper also distinguishes between internal IT processes and project management skills.

The aim of the paper is to explore conceptually and empirically the application of the concept of IT readiness to small firms.

The approach taken was a questionnaire administered to small manufacturing business owners in the Liguria region of Italy. Data were analysed using factor and cluster analysis.

IT readiness concept appears valid with the emergence of three constructs: strategic vision; project management capability; and IT application infrastructure. The date analysis yielded four distinctive and varying profiles of small business owners.

This quantitative study exploring a cross section of small firms suggests antecedents to change have been ignored relative to IT adoption decisions.

Provision of policy and support services requires a much more nuanced approach to small businesses.

There are very few studies of IT readiness in the literature, making the paper original in its intent. The construction of the IT readiness concept appears robust when subjected to empirical testing and yields a number of specific small business profiles with respect to IT.

Our study aims to investigate how the fear of COVID-19 affects job satisfaction and mental well-being. Additionally, we will explore the moderating role of on-the-job embeddedness in these relationships.

The study surveyed 358 Indian-origin IT professionals through Amazon Mechanical Turk. It used confirmatory factor analysis to analyze the measurement model and hierarchical linear regression in SPSS 21 software to examine the structural relationships between variables. A robustness check was conducted using the MODLR macro in SPSS to identify any spurious moderation.

The results reveal a curvilinear (or U-shaped) relationship between COVID-19 fear, job satisfaction and mental well-being. Further, on-the-job embeddedness linearly moderates the relationship between COVID-19 fear and job satisfaction and COVID-19 fear and mental well-being.

The research design is cross-sectional, so results reported about causal relationships are considered cautiously. The relationships involving the variables and their direction are because of the theory’s assumptions rather than the test of causal relationships between variables.

This is the first study to show that the relationship between COVID-19 fear and job satisfaction and COVID-19 fear and mental well-being is curvilinear (or U-shaped). Further, we are again the first to show that on-the-job embeddedness positively moderates the two relationships: COVID-19 fear – job satisfaction and COVID-19 fear – mental well-being. This is one of the few studies that employed MODLR macro to check for spurious moderation.

This study aims to examine the extant E-commerce performance literature to derive a coherent framework to further the understanding, identify research gaps and suggest potential future study directions.

Based on theoretical sampling (Corbin and Strauss, 2008), this study followed Greenhalgh et al. (2009) for the paper sample collection and used exploratory methods before the snowballing technique to identify key sources to uncover the E-commerce performance themes and prior findings systematically.

By reviewing and synthesizing 155 recent articles, this study proposed an integrated framework of E-commerce performance to organize the complex literature parsimoniously. This study found that E-commerce performance exhibits three key dimensions and is influenced by market E-commerce environment, organization E-commerce environment and the dynamic and interactive relationships in between.

The proposed framework offers industry practitioners opportunities to understand determinants and be updated with current practices of E-commerce performance. The findings of this study further point practitioners to directions that can lead to better E-commerce performance.

This study produced a cohesive framework of E-commerce performance based on an extensive review of the literature in both the mainstream and hospitality and tourism fields, addressing the issue of the currently fragmented understanding on E-commerce performance in hospitality and tourism.

This paper aims to understand the conceptualisation of the notion of transformational government that is emerging within the electronic government domain. It reviewed how transformational government is manifest in the policy and strategic commitments of government departments in South Africa. The study focused on understanding the role of public sector planning towards the attainment of transformational government.

The study is interpretive and qualitative in nature. It provides the outcomes of a deductive thematic analysis conducted on strategic documents of government departments to explore their alignment and support for transformational government.

The paper argues for the need for public sector planning that is focused on citizen benefit realisation. The results highlight the significance of strategic plans for developmental transformation. However, the planning instruments were found to have an inconsistent orientation towards transformational government.

The study is significant in light of the implications of public policy and the associated strategic plans for citizens. This paper also contributes to research on the nascent area of transformational government.

The paper aims to report on an exploratory study into how small businesses use Web 2.0 information and communication technologies (ICT) to work collaboratively with other small businesses. The study had two aims: to investigate the benefits available from the use of Web 2.0 in small business collaborations, and to characterize the different types of such online collaborations.

The research uses a qualitative case study methodology based on semi‐structured interviews with the owner‐managers of 12 UK‐based small companies in the business services sector who are early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies.

Benefits from the use of Web 2.0 are categorized as lifestyle benefits, internal operational efficiency, enhanced capability, external communications and enhanced service offerings. A 2×2 framework is developed to categorize small business collaborations using the dimensions of the basis for inter‐organizational collaboration (control vs cooperation) and the level of Web 2.0 ICT use (simple vs sophisticated).

A small number of firms of similar size, sector and location were studied, which limits generalizability. Nonetheless, the results offer a pointer to the likely future use of Web 2.0 tools by other small businesses.

The research provides evidence of the attraction and potential of Web 2.0 for collaborations between small businesses.

The paper is one of the first to report on use of Web 2.0 ICT in collaborative working between small businesses. It will be of interest to those seeking a better understanding of the potential of Web 2.0 in the small business community.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a growing body of research on cloud computing, by studying the small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) adoption process. If SMEs have access to scalable technologies they could potentially deliver products and services that in the past only large enterprises could deliver, flattening the competitive arena.

By adopting the Technological, Organisational and Environmental (TOE) framework as a theoretical base, this qualitative exploratory study used semi‐structured interviews to collect data in 15 different SMEs and service providers in the north east of England. The north east of England was selected as it is a region that aspires to become home to innovative digital firms and most of the companies in the region are SMEs.

The main factors that were identified as playing a significant role in SME adoption of cloud services were: relative advantage, uncertainty, geo‐restriction, compatibility, trialability, size, top management support, prior experience, innovativeness, industry, market scope, supplier efforts and external computing support. In contrast, this study did not find enough evidence that competitive pressure was a significant determinant of cloud computing adoption.

These findings have important implications and great value to the research community, managers and information and communication technologies (ICT) providers, in terms of formulating better strategies for cloud computing adoption. For service providers, using the research model in this study can assist in increasing their understanding of why some SMEs choose to adopt cloud computing services, while seemingly similar ones facing similar market conditions do not. Also, cloud computing providers may need to improve their interaction with SMEs which are involved in the cloud computing experience, in an effort to create a healthy environment for cloud computing adoption, and to remove any vagueness surrounding this type of technology.

This study is an attempt to explore and develop an SME cloud computing adoption model that was theoretically grounded in the TOE framework. By adopting the TOE framework this study has shown that the three contexts of this framework (technological, organisational, and environmental) are connected to each other.

Prior research has found that firms' adoption of digital technologies (i.e. digitalization) enhances transaction efficiency and improves firm performance. However, this finding is based on the assumption that firms respond to consumers' adoption of digital technology (market digitalization) in a timely fashion. The study investigates the impact of market digitalization on firm performance in Latin America, where resistance to change is often higher, despite the positive impact on performance when companies respond to the environmental shock of digitalization by restructuring.

Using data from seven Latin American countries from 1997 to 2018 (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Mexico), fixed-effects panel regression robustly supports the results.

Most Latin American firms fail to capitalize on the benefits of market digitalization, and their performance declines as a result. The authors extend research on digitalization by incorporating theoretical insights from the restructuring literature, finding that implementing a substantial restructuring strategy is a viable way to overcome market digitalization.

The authors demonstrate that the digitalization–firm performance relationship is more complex than has been described in studies using samples from developed economies. The authors establish restructuring as an effective adaptation strategy in Latin America, although the institutional environment's characteristics may constrain or discourage firms from adopting it.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of the influence of different e‐business technologies on capital productivity (CP). Productivity measurement is a useful tool to gauge business performance. However, currently there is little empirical evidence to support the impact of e‐business technologies on productivity.

In this paper, an empirical investigation of 132 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the UK telecommunication sector was carried out, using a hierarchical regression. In doing so, three different types of technologies that may be associated with e‐business (i.e. internet‐based applications, groupware applications, and collective systems) were considered.

The main findings are that any improvement in CP is significantly influenced by groupware applications and collective systems. Therefore, the UK SMEs and other large companies might be over‐investing in the development of web sites to support their internet presence, while under‐investing in promoting awareness and the use of these services to customers (i.e. groupware applications and collective systems).

Measuring the payoff is more difficult in e‐business environments because applications cut across boundaries thereby affecting multiple parties. Hence, alternative metrics to measure payoff from multiple perspectives could be necessary. Productivity measurements were conducted in the SME UK telecommunications sector, and hence findings are valid within this specific context.

The results of this paper provide interesting insights on the performance drivers of companies using e‐business technologies. The findings can guide managers in focusing their energies on e‐business technologies and represent an approach to determine which e‐business technologies are more likely to lead to a boost in productivity.