Antecedents of blockchain adoption: An integrative framework

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2360
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Trevor Clohessy,Thomas Acton,Horst Treiblmaier,Nichola Rogers
• Published date: 01 September 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Antecedents of blockchain adoption: An integrative framework

Trevor Clohessy

1

| Horst Treiblmaier

2

| Thomas Acton

3

| Nichola Rogers

3

1

Department of Enterprise and Technology,

Galway-Mayo-Institute of Technology,

Galway, Ireland

2

Department of International Management,

Modul University, Vienna, Austria

3

Business Information Systems, J.E. Cairnes

School of Business & Economics, National

University of Ireland Galway, Ireland

Correspondence

Horst Treiblmaier, Department of International

Management, Modul University, Am

Kahlenberg 1, 1190, Vienna, Austria.

Email: horst.treiblmaier@modul.ac.at

Abstract

Important technological, organizational, environmental, individual, and task-related

blockchain considerations are identified and discussed. The framework combines five

salient adoption considerations and presents cases of the most important anteced-

ents of organizational blockchain adoption. Further, it provides the theoretical foun-

dation of blockchain adoption by integrating existing frameworks and applying them

to a novel technology.

KEYWORDS

blockchain, blockchain use cases, organizational adoption, technology-organization-

environment framework (TOE)

1|INTRODUCTION

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) are predicted to

revolutionize organizational governance and inter-organizational

transactions (Swan, 2015; Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016). Rather than

keeping data centralized in a traditional ledger, they use independent

computers, often referred to as “nodes”, to record, synchronize and

share individual transactions in their respective electronic ledgers. In

the remainder of this paper, the term blockchain is being used, but

many of the findings presented here also hold for other DLT technolo-

gies that do not necessarily create a linear chain of blocks, such as

IOTA, which uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) called Tangle.

Blockchain first came to prominence in 2008 as the technology

which made the cryptocurrency Bitcoin possible (Nakamoto, 2008).

Within the next decade, blockchain is expected to disrupt a multitude

of industries, including health, food, finance, government, healthcare,

logistics, transportation, and tourism (Ito, Narula, & Ali, 2017;

Kshetri, 2018; Önder & Treiblmaier, 2018; Stafford & Treiblmaier,

2020; Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016; Ying, Jia, & Du, 2018). Blockchain

provides adopters with various advantages, such as transparency

(Kosba, Miller, Shi, Wen, & Papamanthou, 2016); anonymity (Zyskind,

Nathan, & Pentland, 2015); immutability (Pilkington, 2016); security

(Subramanian, 2018), and transaction speed (Kiayias & Panagiotakos,

2016). To better understand blockchain's potential to simultaneously

transform economic as well as social systems in combination with the

lack of systematic inquiry on blockchain adoption, the following

research question is proposed:

RQ: What considerations influence organizational blockchain adoption?

The field of innovationtheory is operationalized by firstidentifying

the core concepts and subsequently identifying the factors that drive

adoption decisions. Innovation theory has previously been used to

study information technology (IT) innovation adoption (Rogers, 1995;

Treiblmaier, Pinterits, & Floh, 2006; Parker & Castleman, 2009; Yu &

Hang, 2010; Van de Weerd, Van de Weerd, Mangula, &

Brinkkemper, 2016). The frequently applied TOE (technology-organiza-

tion-environment) framework is adopted as a starting point since it is

comprehensive and easily expandable (Clohessy, Acton, &

Rogers, 2019). It is complemented by includingindividual and task con-

siderations, thereby combining the theory of task-technology fit (TTF),

the technology acceptance model (TAM) (Gangwar, Date, &

Ramaswamy, 2015) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of

technology (UTAUT) (Awa, Ojiabo, & Orokor, 2017).These frameworks

and theories integrate numerous important adoption antecedents. Con-

sequently, a review of the existing blockchain literature is conducted

using the technology, organizational and environmental (TOE) frame-

work (DePietro, Wiarda, & Fleischer, 1990) extended by task and indi-

vidual factors to detect significant considerations that potentially

impact blockchainadoption decision in organizations.

This article is structured as follows. The first section gives a short

overview of the blockchain conceptand summarizes the benefits asso-

ciated with the technology together with various use cases. Subse-

quently, the extended TOE framework used in thispaper is introduced

JEL classification codes: D20, D21, D23, L22, M10, M15, M20, O30, O33.

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2360

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