Impact of External Environmental Factors on RFID Adoption in Australian Livestock Industry: An Exploratory Study

A significant numbers of ‘mad cow’ disease outbreaks around the globe as well as the recent food safety concerns in Japan, Europe, and Korea increase the necessity of a lifetime traceable information system of animals. Ideally, this system would generate a lifetime history of the potentially affected animals and simultaneously allow unaffected livestock owners to continue to trade. Therefore, as a result of the market demand and pressure, and to save local industry, a number of countries around the globe have adopted Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, as RFID has enormous capabilities in identifying and tracking animals. At farm level, the farmers have adopted RFID due to the external pressure emanating from various stakeholders and the contextual environment. The contextual external environment, therefore, contributes towards most for RFID’s adoption. This paper first examines the influence of the external environmental factors on RFID adoption in various worldwide applications and then determines how important those factors are in Australian livestock industry, using seven livestock farms as cases. The study finds that legislative pressure is the main driving factor in RFID adoption while competitive pressure and external support are also important. The paper then proposes a framework that contributes to the adoption theories and can be used to identify the impacts of the components of the external environment in practice.