The Persistence of a Stigmatized Practice: A Study of Competitive Intelligence

Abstract

Studies on the diffusion of practices provide valuable insights into how organizations adopt, adapt, sustain and abandon practices over time. However, few studies focus on how stigmatized practices diffuse and persist, even when they risk tainting the adopters. To address this issue and understand how firms manage stigmatized practices, we study US organizations associated with the practice of competitive intelligence (CI) between 1985 and 2012. CI includes legitimate information gathering practices that are sometimes also associated with infringements and espionage. Our findings suggest that CI became highly diffused and persisted despite the risk of stigmatizing its adopters. We identified three factors to explain CI's persistence: (1) keeping it opaque to avoid the negative effects of stigmatization, (2) 'constructing' usefulness to justify its ongoing use by leveraging accepted beliefs and invoking fear of unilateral abandonment and (3) adapting it by developing multiple versions to increase its zone of acceptability. These three factors contribute to practice persistence by allowing firms to dilute the potential stigma from use of the practice. Our contribution lies in explaining the adoption, diffusion and ongoing use of a stigmatized practice whose benefits cannot be overtly acknowledged or made public.

Adoption of business analytics and impact on performance: a qualitative study in retail

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“…Many characteristics of a technology can influence its adoption (Reinmoeller and Ansari, 2015;Rogers 1995;Li 2008;Thong 1999;Tornatzky and Fleischer, 1990;Wang et al 2010;Zhu et al 2006). These include complexity of technologies, compatibility with practices already existing in a firm, perceived benefits, emergence of big-data computing platforms, and technologies that help increase the security of big-data.…”

“…Thus this study focuses on the UK retail sector to understand factors to be considered by a firm for successful adoption of BA. Though there are studies in the Information Systems literature (e.g., Johnson, 1999;Krause et al, 1998;Ashurst et al, 2012;Reinmoeller and Ansari, 2015) that explored the impact of IT investments on performance of firms, studies on the impact of BA are relatively recent and there is still little empirical evidence to understand factors for successful adoption of BA and improve firm performance.…”

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