Culturally Appropriate Acceptance Models for Civic Engagement Systems in Saudi Arabia

Information systems that support civic engagement for the public good are a promising new category of technology-mediated social participation. However, adoption of these smart-phone enabled systems varies widely across countries. Building off existing research on how culture mediates technology acceptance, we seek to develop a culturally appropriate model from the ground up that can help explain this cross-cultural difference, with a specific focus on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a test case. This process involves mapping constructs from existing models, such as UTAUT, and theories, such as the Expectancy Theory of Motivation, to the cultural context and developing new contracts when no appropriate match is available. This paper reports early results from field work conducted in Saudi Arabia to generate these mappings.