Toward the understanding of national culture in the success of non‐pharmaceutical technological interventions in mitigating COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This study conceptually explores the relationship between a nation’s culture and the success of utilizing various digital technologies to mitigate the spread of a pandemic, such as novel coronavirus (COVID-19). In the absence of a cure or vaccine of COVID-19, the national governments and public health authorities have been aggressively utilizing digital technologies to mitigate the pandemic spread. Given the urgency caused by COVID-19, this study highlights the importance of considering a country’s national culture in evaluating the efficacy of a given digital technology, despite how promising or groundbreaking it may sound, in combating the spread of an infectious disease. Relying on the two critical dimensions of national culture, power distance and individualism/collectivism, this study proposes a framework that describes how people from different countries, depending on their prevalent national cultural values, would be receptive (or intolerant) to using government-run technology solutions meant for curbing the pandemic spread.

The Digital Divide in the Era of COVID-19: An Investigation into an Important Obstacle to the Access to the mHealth by the Citizen

“…There is no doubt that in the use of non-pharmaceutical technologies [26] will also significantly depend on overcoming cultural barriers.…”

Questioning Racial and Gender Bias in AI-based Recommendations: Do Espoused National Cultural Values Matter?

“…George et al ( 2018 ) examined the impact of the interaction between cultural values and different communication media on individuals’ ability to detect deception successfully. Moreover, a recent study has suggested that national cultural values may affect the extent to which countries utilize non-pharmaceutical technological interventions (NPTI) in mitigating the spread of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (Gupta et al, 2021 ).…”

A structured literature review on the interplay between emerging technologies and COVID-19 – insights and directions to operations fields

“…In this vein, organizations and the whole society can benefit from a wide range of disruptive digital technologies (M. Gupta et al, 2021 ; Spanaki et al, 2021 ) to face an exceptional event like COVID-19. These include artificial intelligence (Belhadi et al, 2021 ; Fosso Wamba, Bawack, et al, 2021 ), blockchain (Dubey, Gunasekaran, Bryde, et al, 2020 ; Wamba & Queiroz, 2020 ), big data analytics (Dubey, Gunasekaran, Childe, et al, 2020 ; Fosso Wamba, Queiroz, et al, 2020 ), the internet of things (A. Sinha et al, 2019 ), 5G (Siriwardhana et al, 2020 ), 3d printing (Belhouideg, 2020 ), virtual reality (Mao et al, 2020 ), augmented reality (Sahu et al, 2020 ), digital twin applications (Ivanov & Dolgui, 2020 ), as well as the Industry 4.0 applications (Kumar & Singh, 2021 ; Queiroz, Ivanov et al, 2020 ).…”