research proposals on adoption

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Adoption research, practice, and societal trends: Ten years of progress

Affiliation.

1 Independent Practice.
PMID: 29283657
DOI: 10.1037/amp0000218

Adoption involves the legal transfer of parental rights and responsibilities from a child's birth parents to adults who will raise the child (Reitz & Watson, 1992). Research related to adoption has expanded over the past 10 years and has incorporated more focus on implications for practice and public policy. This expansion has reflected increased awareness of the lived experience of adopted individuals, in addition to that of adoptive families and birth or first parents and families, collectively known as the adoption kinship network (Grotevant & McRoy, 1998). Trends discussed included research and social trends or movements (2007-2017) since the publication of the final article in a series of articles in the psychological literature related to adoption in The Counseling Psychologist (Baden & Wiley, 2007; Lee, 2003; O'Brien & Zamostny, 2003; Wiley & Baden, 2005; Zamostny, O'Brien, Baden, & Wiley, 2003; Zamostny, Wiley, O'Brien, Lee, & Baden, 2003). This article summarizes the social trends and research related to adoption over the last 10 years, including longitudinal and meta-analytic studies, increased research and conceptualization of ethnic and racial identity development, research on microaggressions, and research on diverse adoptive families, including those with gay and lesbian parents. Social trends included increased knowledge related to Internet accessibility, genetic information, continued focus on openness, and viewing adoption through a more critical lens. Implications are discussed for the development of programs that enhance competence of mental health professionals and adoption professionals in adoption-competent practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Attachment across the Lifespan: Insights from Adoptive Families

K. lee raby.

Department of Psychology, University of Utah

Mary Dozier

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware

Research with adoptive families offers novel insights into longstanding questions about the significance of attachment across the lifespan. We illustrate this by reviewing adoption research addressing two of attachment theory’s central ideas. First, studies of children who were adopted after experiencing severe adversity offer powerful tests of the unique consequences of experiences in early attachment relationships. Although children who experience early maltreatment or institutionalization show remarkable recovery in the quality of their attachments after being placed with their adoptive families, experiencing pre-adoptive adversity also has long-lasting repercussions for these individuals’ later attachment representations. Second, adoptive families allow for genetically-informed examinations of the intergenerational transmission process. Indeed, despite the lack of genetic relatedness, adoptive parents’ attachment representations are associated with their children’s attachment behaviors and representations across childhood and adolescence.

Attachment theory provides a rich framework for understanding the impact of close relationships for both typical and atypical forms of social and emotional development across the lifespan. Many studies have tested attachment theory’s hypotheses over the last several decades [ 1 ]. Nonetheless, questions and debates have persisted, even for attachment theory’s basic propositions. In this review, we highlight how research with adoptive families can provide novel insights about attachment processes across the lifespan. Specifically, we summarize recent findings that address two longstanding questions in attachment theory: whether early caregiving experiences have a long-term impact on attachment representations that persist across development and whether parents’ attachment representations are intergenerationally transmitted.

Long-term consequences of early attachment experiences

One of attachment theory’s central hypotheses is that early experiences within attachment relationships shape the formation of a set of mental representations of close relationships that are carried forward across childhood and adolescence and into adulthood [ 2 , 3 ]. This controversial idea has been the source of continued debate about the degree to which the attachment representations formed early in life are malleable and can be revised based on interpersonal experiences at later ages. Although there is widespread agreement that individuals’ attachment representations respond adaptively to shifts in the caregiving environment [ 4 ], some have proposed that experiences in early attachment relationships leave an enduring mark that continues to shape later development even amid changes in caregiving contexts [ 5 ].

An obstacle to testing these ideas is that the quality of the caregiving environment is fairly stable across time for most families. As a result, it is difficult to clearly distinguish between the contributions of early versus later experiences in most studies [ 6 ]. In contrast, children who are adopted after being maltreated or after being raised in a group-based institutional setting experience a profound change in their environments. These children often experience pre-adoptive conditions that are poorly suited to their developmental needs, including a lack of consistent attachment figures who are responsive to their signals. Adoptive parents typically provide these children with stable and highly enriched relationship experiences. For this reason, investigations of children who have been adopted after experiencing early adversity are well positioned to evaluate the potential long-term consequences of early experiences for attachment representations [ 7 ].

Adoption and attachment during early childhood

Research on attachment in the context of adoption has traditionally focused on observations of children’s attachment behaviors during infancy and early childhood. Findings indicate that young children’s attachment systems are capable of reorganizing and flexibly adapting to new caregivers after earlier relationships are disrupted. Specifically, most children who are placed in adoptive or foster homes appear to consolidate attachments to their new caregivers within a few months [ 8 , 9 ]. Moreover, these children show substantial recovery in attachment quality, as the prevalence of attachment security is considerably higher among adopted children than among children in maltreating homes or institutional settings [ 10 – 12 ]. Nonetheless, children with histories of pre-adoptive adversity are still at risk for forming insecure attachments to their adoptive parents relative to non-adopted children [ 10 ].

Altogether, these findings support a nuanced view of the plasticity of attachment representations and the potential long-term effects of early caregiving experiences. Early experiences within attachment relationships do not singlehandedly determine later attachment patterns; lawful changes in attachment representations in response to changes in close relationships are possible. At the same time these changes are constrained by prior development [ 5 ]. The attachment patterns established within early relationships are carried over and serve as the basis for adopted children’s expectations of their new caregivers. In this way, experiences of early adversity can have lingering consequences for later attachment outcomes even in the midst of change.

Adoption and attachment at later ages

Studies of the attachment outcomes of adopted children and adolescents suggest that the consequences of early experiences of maltreatment or institutionalization vary across the different facets of the attachment system. Experiences of maltreatment or institutionalization appear to have long-term implications for global representations of attachment relationships (i.e., thoughts and feelings about close relationships in general). Adopted individuals with histories of adversity are more likely than non-adopted individuals to development insecure representations, as assessed with story-stem methods [ 13 – 16 ], autobiographical narratives [ 17 , but see 18 ], and family drawings [ 19 – 20 ]. In contrast, there is limited evidence that early maltreatment or institutionalization have long-term effects on adoptive individuals’ attachment security within the adoptive parent-child relationship. Parents report few differences in the attachment behaviors of children adopted after experiencing adversity and non-adopted children [ 21 – 25 ], and adopted children and adolescents do not report feeling less security in their relationships with their parents than non-adopted children [ 26 – 28 ].

Emerging research on attachment among adults who were adopted as children has produced similar findings. Experiencing early adversity appears to have limited effects on adopted individuals’ sense of security with their adoptive parents [ 10 ]. For example, adults between the ages of 22-25 years who were adopted as children from severely depriving Romanian orphanages by English families did not differ in the perceived quality of their relationships with their adoptive parents from young adults who were adopted but did not experience early deprivation [ 29 ]. In contrast, experiencing early adversity does have long-term consequences for adopted adults’ general representations of attachment as assessed by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). For example, a sample of adults adopted later in childhood after experiencing early adversity exhibited relatively high rates of non-autonomous (insecure) states of mind as adults as assessed by the AAI [ 30 ]. Similarly, age of adoption has been associated with increased risk for non-autonomous states of mind among adults who were adopted internationally from group-based, institutional care [ 31 ]. These findings are consistent with longitudinal evidence that childhood maltreatment confers risk for non-autonomous states of mind among non-adopted adults [ 32 ].

Altogether, these recent research findings indicate adverse early caregiving experiences may have persistent effects on adopted individuals’ attachment patterns that extend into adulthood. These long-term effects, however, appear to be unique to adopted individuals’ more generalized representations of attachment. Adopted individuals construct representations of their new attachment relationships that become increasingly independent of their early, pre-adoptive experiences. However, these relationship-specific representations may exist alongside rather than in place of more abstract and global representations of attachment, which appear to be more resistant to change.

Intergenerational transmission of attachment

A second central proposition of attachment theory is that attachment representations are transmitted from one generation to the next. Parents’ mental representations of attachment relationships are expected to shape their responses to children’s behavioral cues which in turn guide the young child’s sense of security (or lack thereof) within the attachment relationship [ 33 ]. To date, dozens of studies of the intergenerational transmission of attachment have offered support for this basic process [ 34 ]. However, because most of these studies have involved biologically-intact parent-child pairs, some have questioned whether intergenerational associations are due to genetic factors shared between parents and their children [ 35 , but see 36 ]. Research with adoptive families offers the unique opportunity for testing the intergenerational transmission process among genetically unrelated parent-child pairs.

A highly related question is whether adoptive parents’ attachment representations differ from those of non-adoptive parents. Dozier and Rutter [ 37 ] suggested that adoptive parents may be more likely to have autonomous (secure) states of mind than non-adoptive parents based on the evidence that most adoptive parents exhibit high levels of psychological adjustment. Consistent with that idea, nearly 75% of parents who adopted internationally and couples who are seeking to adopt domestically are classified as having an autonomous state of mind during the Adult Attachment Interview [ 38 – 39 ]. This estimate is substantially higher than the normative base rate of 55-60% for low-risk mothers [ 40 ]. Thus, the majority of parents who pursue adoption have developed attachment-related representations that are assumed to promote secure parent-child attachments in the next generation.

An initial study of the intergenerational transmission of attachment among genetically-unrelated parent-child dyads reported a high concordance between foster mothers’ attachment states of mind and their infants’ patterns of attachment [ 41 ]. Subsequent studies that used similar methods with foster and adoptive parent-child pairs have provided mixed results [ 42 – 43 ], and a recent meta-analysis of this research literature indicated that the association between parents’ attachment states of mind and young children’s attachment patterns was conditional on the biological relatedness of the parent-child pairs [ 34 ]. Among adoptive and foster parents, the intergenerational association was in the expected direction but not statistically significant and approximately half the size of the association observed in studies with biological caregivers.

Although these meta-analytic results do not rule out the possibility of genetic contributions to the intergenerational transmission of attachment, there are plausible environmentally-orientated explanations for the inconsistent results with adoptive parent-infants pairs. First, parents tend to respond to their children in ways that complement their children’s attachment behaviors [ 44 ]. Thus, regardless of the parents’ own attachment representations, parents of adopted children with histories of maltreatment or institutionalization may at times behave in ways that inadvertently perpetuate their children’s insecure expectations of attachment figures. Second, the attachment-related expectations that children construct based on their pre-adoptive interpersonal experiences tend to be carried over into children’s new relationships with their adoptive parents and can be resistant to change. This stability of children’s attachment representations may weaken the associations between the adoptive caregiving environment (including adoptive parents’ attachment representations) and adopted children’s attachment outcomes, especially for children with histories of maltreatment or institutionalization who were recently placed with their adoptive families.

These alternative explanations raise the possibility that the associations between parents’ and children’s attachment patterns may be stronger when children have spent more time in their adoptive families and have had more opportunities for recovering from experiences of pre-adoptive adversity than when they have had less time and fewer opportunities. Mounting evidence suggests that is the case. Adoptive parents’ attachment states of mind are associated with their adopted children’ attachment behaviors and representations during middle childhood adolescence [ 45 – 49 ]. These findings suggest that, despite the lack of genetic relatedness, adoptive parents’ attachment representations shape the attachment patterns of their children and can support recovery in attachment quality for children with histories of early adversity.

Future directions

Additional research with adoptive families will continue to enrich our understanding of attachment across the lifespan. For example, only a few investigations have examined attachment outcomes among adults who were adopted after experiencing early maltreatment or institutionalization. Longitudinal studies that follow adopted individuals with histories of early adversity from childhood to adulthood would advance our understanding of the long-term impact of early caregiving experiences for attachment during adulthood. Similarly, most reports of the attachment outcomes of adopted individuals after early childhood have included only one measure of attachment. Studies that repeatedly gather information about adopted individuals’ generalized attachment representations as well as their representations of relationships with adoptive parents would allow for clearer and more direct tests of the potential differential plasticity of the various facets of the attachment system.

A question that remains unanswered by adoption researchers is whether early caregiving experiences have implications for the quality of attachments adoptees form with romantic partners. To our knowledge the only data available on the romantic attachment patterns of adult adoptees have involved individuals adopted at birth [ 50 ]. As a result, the findings are indicative of the potential influence of adoption—rather than early adversity per se—on individuals’ sense of security with adult romantic attachments.

Lastly, additional research is needed into the mechanisms that account for the intergenerational transmission of attachment among adopted parent-child pairs. Relatively few studies have examined the specific aspects of the caregiving environment that may promote the development of secure attachments among adopted individuals [ 47 ]. In addition to the clear theoretical value, information about the specific caregiving behaviors that contribute to attachment-related recovery of children adopted after maltreatment or institutionalization has a vital role in the development and application of attachment-based interventions for these at-risk populations.

Adoption leads to improvements in attachment security for neglected children
Early adversity has long-lasting effects on adoptees’ attachment representations
Attachment patterns can be transmitted across generations within adoptive families

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health R01MH084135 and R01 MH074374 to Mary Dozier.

Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

Conflict of Interest

The authors have no conflict of interest.

Contributor Information

K. Lee Raby, Department of Psychology, University of Utah.

Mary Dozier, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as

*of special interest

**of outstanding interest

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Research proposal for Technology Adoption in the OER Ecosystem

In the scientific literature of the past 15 years it can be found numerous research initiatives and experiences related to the adoption of new technologies in education. Technological innovations have been constant, often accompanied by educational innovations, but the pace of adoption of the same is not as intense as its development. Furthermore, not only changing technologies and methods, students and learning objectives also change, which in many cases cause many conflicts and difficulties. This paper proposes as a research proposal to analyze and promote technological innovation of teachers based on the adoption of the open education model focused on Open Educational Resources. A study of the elements that make up this ecosystem is made and a methodology and a research driven by models of technological innovation is proposed, refered to important concepts of the ecosystem of Open Educational Resources, innovation and technology adoption models.

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Carmelo Branimir España Villegas

The scientific literature of the last 15 years includes numerous pieces of research and experiences about the adoption of innovations in education. Technological innovations have been constant, in many cases accompanied by pedagogical innovations, but the pace of adoption is not as intense as desired. This paper introduces the concepts of technological innovation, adoption, Open Educational Resources (OER) and OER ecosystem. From these concepts, a proposal is devised to promote adoption of innovations in education based on the OER Ecosystem, guided by the Technological Acceptance Model (TAM) for innovation. Results of an instrument (questionnaire) applied to Teachers from universities in Spain, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile are provided, which evidence the need for training in new technologies, pedagogies and in the OER Ecosystem. The survey indicates that universities neither support institutional repositories and programmes nor develop policies to promote faculty training and development.

Maria Fragkaki

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International Journal of Information Technology

Lassaad Smirani

Open and distance learning is the learning of beyond the limitations provide equal opportunity to the marginalised students for learning and understanding of learning material. Technology plays a crucial role to the promotion of it. Technology gives more flexibility to the teachers as well as learners because mostly it works beyond the line of time and distance. The advanced nature of technology makes it more useful for the education process and also introduces a new innovative technology based application and tools for teachers and students to enhance their knowledge to promote open and distance learning. Adoption of technology for it, an essential aspect to the use of technology in education. Technological innovative methods are replacing direct students and teacher's interaction. The use of technology in learning without limitation provide condition and opportunity to the students to communicate with their teachers anytime and anywhere to resolve their educational problems. This paper endeavours to study the adoption, use and impact of technology in open and distance learning and also highlight some other key aspects of technology to promote distance education as well as learning without limitations.

Open educational resources (OER) are making their way into a variety of educational contexts from formal lesson planning to just in time learning. Educators and training professionals have been recognized as an important audience for these materials. The concepts of self-efficacy and outcome judgment from social cognitive learning theory serve as theoretical constructs to measure educator perceptions of OER. This study uses a path analysis, based on the technology acceptance model, to understand adoption of these resources by this audience with a particular emphasis on self-efficacy. Among the participants, three main groups were identified: K-12 educators, higher education professionals, and those involved in workplace training. A discriminant function analysis found that K-12 educators stood out as finding OER relevant to improving their practice. Recommendations are made in regards to an emphasis on easy to use designs to improve application self-efficacy of OER and instructional...

Apertura Revista

This article is based on a research which sought to identify the technological appropriation of five teachers who excel using technologies, according to their institute’s directors, to incorporate open educational resources (OER) to support educative practices and propitiate the student’s meaningful learning; these OER are public domain resources used for teaching, learning and researching under some intellectual license that allows their use and re-purposing. The case study was the methodology and also electronic tests, observation sheets and triangulating of results were used. The results indicated that teachers have dissimilar knowledges and technological strengths –with some coincidence– using OER to support educative process, which showed to be useful as referents to integrate a proposal about using, selecting and producing OER with effectiveness which allow better educative practices and propitiate the meaningful learning.

British Journal of Educational Technology

serpil yalcinalp

Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning

It has been argued that Open Educational Resources (OER) present opportunities for innovation in education. However, there has been a lack of retrospective analysis of the forms of innovation that can emerge through OER, and the processes and challenges these entail. This paper presents a post-project analysis of the diverse uses and impacts of open courses produced through an international OER initiative. A thematic analysis of retrospective interviews and documentation from this case study is reported on, guided by a review of relevant concepts from innovation and OER literature. Through this we identify three archetypal forms through which the OER created opportunities for innovation: Specific Adoption; Preferred Practice; and Foundations for Innovation. We identify drivers and inhibitors through which these forms of innovation interacted with each other in this initiative. This elaborates on the notion that a single existing model does not capture the multi-faceted relationships between innovation and OER.

Educational Technology

Lauren Resnicow

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Adoptive parenting and attachment: association of the internal working models between adoptive mothers and their late-adopted children during adolescence.

$\r\nCecilia S. Pace*$

1 Department of Educational Sciences, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy
2 Department of Pedagogy, Psychology, Philosophy, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
3 Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
4 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy
5 Department of Humanities, Literature, Cultural Heritage, University of Foggia, Foggia, Italy

Introduction: Recent literature has shown that the good outcome of adoption would mostly depend on the quality of adoptive parenting, which is strongly associated with the security of parental internal working models (IWMs) of attachment. Specifically, attachment states-of-mind of adoptive mothers classified as free and autonomous and without lack of resolution of loss or trauma could represent a good protective factor for adopted children, previously maltreated and neglected. While most research on adoptive families focused on pre-school and school-aged children, the aim of this study was to assess the concordance of IWMs of attachment in adoptive dyads during adolescence.

Method: Our pilot-study involved 76 participants: 30 adoptive mothers (mean age = 51.5 ± 4.3), and their 46 late-adopted adolescents (mean age = 13.9 ± 1.6), who were all aged 4–9 years old at time of adoption (mean age = 6.3 ± 1.5). Attachment representations of adopted adolescents were assessed by the Friend and Family Interview (FFI), while adoptive mothers’ state-of-mind with respect to attachment was classified by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Adolescents’ verbal intelligence was controlled for.

Results: Late-adopted adolescents were classified as follows: 67% secure, 26% dismissing, and 7% preoccupied in the FFI, while their adoptive mothers’ AAI classifications were 70% free-autonomous, 7% dismissing, and 23% unresolved. We found a significant concordance of 70% (32 dyads) between the secure–insecure FFI and AAI classifications. Specifically adoptive mothers with high coherence of transcript and low unresolved loss tend to have late-adopted children with high secure attachment, even if the adolescents’ verbal intelligence made a significant contribution to this prediction.

Discussion: Our results provides an empirical contribution to the literature concerning the concordance of attachment in adoptive dyads, highlighting the beneficial impact of highly coherent states-of-mind of adoptive mothers on the attachment representations of their late-adopted adolescent children.

Introduction

Attachment theory stressed the importance of early parent–child relationships for normative development of socio-emotional functioning across the life span ( Thompson, 1999 ). These relationships play a significant role on the development of a child’s internal working models (IWMs) of the self, others, and relationships influencing the child’s attachment security ( Bowlby, 1969 ), and they guide the construction and the expectations of future social interactions. IWMs of caregivers are expected to affect parenting and caregiving transactions that mothers enact both consciously and unconsciously in their interactions with the child ( Bretherton and Munholland, 2008 ; Dazzi and Zavattini, 2011 ; Velotti et al., 2011 ). Literature also established that parents’ IWMs, manifested in discussions about childhood experiences during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George et al., unpublished), predicted the quality of the infant-parent attachment relationship as observed in Ainsworth’s Strange Situation procedure (SSP; Ainsworth et al., 1978 ; van IJzendoorn, 1995 ; Steele et al., 1996 ; Tini et al., 2003 ; Verhage et al., 2015 ).

Overall, literature suggested parents’ IWMs that form the basis of parenting behaviors (sensitivity, attunement, monitoring, etc.) may influence the child’s IWMs from early childhood to adolescence ( Karavasilis et al., 2003 ; Gamble and Roberts, 2005 ; Bosmans et al., 2006 ; Gallarin and Alonso-Arbiol, 2012 ). However, only a few studies assessed the concordance of attachment representations between parent–children dyads (mostly “mother–son”) in this stage of life ( Rosenstein and Horowitz, 1996 ; Zimmerman et al., 1997 ; Allen et al., 2003 ; Scharf et al., 2012 ), providing evidence of a weak to moderate intergenerational effect. Further, the measurement of attachment in adolescence presents some weaknesses. Literature showed that, when assessing IWMs, the AAI ( Bakermans-Kranenburg and van IJzendoorn, 2009 ) and the Attachment Interview for Childhood and Adolescence (AICA; Ammaniti et al., unpublished) were used, but without taking into account the specificity of this stage. Moreover, conscious attachment styles may be captured by questionnaires, such as the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA; Armsden and Greenberg, 1987 ; Pace et al., 2011 ), which measures attachment security and its factors (trust, communication, and alienation) in adolescence, but presents obvious limitations characterizing self-reports. Finally, in recent years, the Friends and Family Interview (FFI; Steele and Steele, 2005 ) were developed to assess attachment representations in late childhood and adolescence, including important relationships beyond the child–parent relationships and provided encouraging results ( Kriss et al., 2012 ; Pace, 2014 ; Steele et al., unpublished).

Growing literature has recently examined attachment among adoptive families in the years following adoption. Adoption in Italy is a very common phenomenon. In the period between 2000 and 2013, 42,048 children were legally authorized to enter the country for adoption. Children were adopted by 33,820 couples with an average of 1.24 children per couple ( Italian Commission for International Adoptions, 2013 ). Internationally adopted children’s mean age at arrival was 5.5 years with four children out of 10 (42.1%) between 1 and 4 years old and 43.8% of adopted children between 5 and 9 years old; 8.8% were 10 years or older, while only 5.4% of adopted children were younger than 1 year old.

As reported in a 2009 meta-analysis ( van den Dries et al., 2009 ), children who were adopted before 12 months of age were as securely attached as their non-adopted peers, whereas children adopted after their first birthday were less securely attached than non-adopted children ( d = 0.80, CI = 0.49–1.12). Moreover, adopted children showed more disorganized attachment compared to their non-adopted peers ( d = 0.36, CI = 0.04–0.68), but they were less often disorganized compared to institutionalized children. Thus, early adoption is a considerable and effective intervention in the domain of attachment relationships ( Lionetti, 2014 ).

However, as mentioned above, in the Italian adoption practice, almost 95% of internationally adopted children were placed after 1 year of life, and, thus, they should be considered as late-adopted children ( Howe, 1998 ). Late adoption represents an exceptional intervention aimed at influencing and reprocessing representations of children who often suffered traumas, abuse, and neglect in their early infancy or childhood ( Rutter and O’Connor, 2004 ; Juffer and van IJzendoorn, 2005 ; van IJzendoorn and Juffer, 2006 ; Dozier and Rutter, 2008 ). Furthermore, no differences were found in the attachment patterns between international and domestic adopted children probably because similar early negative experiences were suffered by the adopted children, independently from the type of adoption ( van den Dries et al., 2009 ). On the one hand, late-adoption represents a window for the investigation of the impact of children’s negative pre-adoption experiences on the development of insecure-disorganized IWMs of attachment ( Steele et al., 2007 ; Pace et al., 2015b ). On the other hand, late adoption embodies the opportunity for children’s schemas to be revised and reprocessed based on the “new” relationships with adoptive caregivers ( Steele et al., 2003 , 2008 ; Juffer and van IJzendoorn, 2005 ). Some studies highlighted that previously maltreated and neglected children placed after 4 years of age and assessed both through a behavioral procedure and narrative tasks ( Pace and Zavattini, 2011 ; Pace et al., 2012 ) showed increasing attachment security over 2 years after adoption. Additional findings showed that late adopted children improve markedly in the positive representations of the self, the caregiver, and in the relationship with others and also in the narrative’s coherence ( Hodges et al., 2003 ; Kaniuk et al., 2004 ). As suggested from these empirical findings, further positive revision may be possible, even in older adopted children, and, therefore, exploring which parental characteristics could foster their “earned” security deserves attention ( Pace et al., 2012 ). In the Attachment Representations and Adoption Outcome study ( Steele et al., 2003 , 2007 ) mothers’ insecurity of attachment (either dismissing or preoccupied) as assessed by the AAI 3 months after adoption was correlated with children’s (4–8 years old) negative narratives and disorganized or bizarre themes proposed in an attachment story completion. In addition, children with unresolved adoptive mothers failed to establish secure attachment and positive representations of self and others ( Steele et al., 2003 ). Both parents’ attachment insecurity was strongly associated with high levels of disorganization or insecurity in the adoptees and confirmed even 2 years later. When neither parents’ AAI was secure at the time of placement, 2 years later 86% of adopted children scored high for disorganization ( Steele et al., 2008 ). Veríssimo and Salvaterra (2006) , assessing a sample of Portuguese children adopted between 3 weeks and 47 months of age, found that the scores reflecting the presence and quality of maternal secure representations predicted the level of attachment security of adopted children, as measured by Secure Base Scripts (SBS; Waters and Waters, 2006 ) and assessed by the Attachment Behavior Q-Set (AQS; Waters, 1995 ) (Spearman rho = 0.38, p < 0.01) with no correlations either with child’s age at time of adoption or the child’s age at time of assessment. Barone and Lionetti (2012) , assessing parents’ attachment state-of-mind using the AAI and children’s (3–5 years old) attachment patterns, administered a doll story completion task 12–18 months after placement and found 80% concordance with respect to two attachment classifications in mother–child dyads and 60% concordance with respect to three-way attachment classification. Concerning father–child dyads, no significant associations were found. Pace and Zavattini (2011) and Pace et al. (2012) found that late-adopted children (4–7 years old) who presented significant enhancing attachment security were predominantly placed with secure adoptive mothers ( p < 0.05). However, the concordance between the adoptive mothers’ attachment representations and their adopted children’s narratives on the two-way system (secure vs. insecure) was not significant (56%).

All these studies focus on the few years after late-adopted children’s placement, usually during middle childhood, while only a few studies examine what happens during later stages, such as late-childhood and adolescence. These studies show a percentage of secure attachment of adolescent adoptees that range between 32% ( Beijersbergen et al., 2012 ) and 63% ( Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ), using the AAI or AICA and from 32% ( Escobar and Santelices, 2013 ) to 51% ( Groza et al., 2012 ) and 60% ( Barcons et al., 2012 ), using the FFI. Most of these studies found no unresolved or disorganized (U/D) classifications either by the AAI or the FFI (only 2% in Barcons et al., 2012 ), meaning that adoptees were able to develop an organized attachment strategy, despite their early negative experiences. This data is worthwhile given that the disorganized attachment could be considered a strong predictor of short- and long-term psychopathological problems ( van IJzendoorn et al., 1999 ; West et al., 2001 ). Except for Escobar and Santelices (2013) , no study found a significant association between the age of adoption and attachment patterns, meaning that older age at adoption did not automatically imply high attachment insecurity.

Given that parenting seems to continue to influence children’s attachment representations, even during adolescence ( Hoeve et al., 2011 ), attachment researchers have recently questioned the role of adoptive parents in influencing attachment in adopted adolescents. A longitudinal adoption study ( Beijersbergen et al., 2012 ), assessed through the AAI, revealed that mothers of secure adolescents showed significantly more sensitive support during conflicts than did mothers of insecure adolescents. The authors concluded that both early and later maternal sensitive support were important for continuity of secure attachment for the first 14 years of life of early adopted adolescents. Another study ( Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ) assessing attachment in adopted adolescents and their adoptive parents, using the AAI and the AICA (Ammaniti et al., unpublished), did not find any significant concordance between mother–child and father–child two-way attachment systems. However, they suggested that the majority of parents who were secure with respect to attachment had children who were also secure, while those who were insecure had adopted children who were equally distributed in the two-way attachment classifications (secure vs. insecure). Limitations of this study, however, should be addressed due to both the wide variability of the sample characteristics and the lack of control for background variables.

Given the growing importance of assessing attachment bonds between adoptive parents and their children, especially in adolescence where there is a shortage of literature, in the current correlational study we investigated attachment concordance between late-adopted adolescents and their adoptive mothers. We expected correspondence between mothers’ AAI attachment representations and children’s FFI attachment representations (AAI and FFI categories and state-of-mind scales), mostly at the level of secure vs. insecure partition, as we controlled for demographic variables, adolescents’ verbal cognitive status, that can foster secure attachment patterns ( West et al., 2013 ), and maternal psychopathological symptoms.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

The adoptive families were recruited through two authorized international adoption agencies [e.g., Centro Italiano di Aiuti all’Infanzia-CIAI (Italian Center for Supporting Childhood) and Associazione Teresa Scalfati (Teresa Scalfati’s Association)], an association supporting adoptive families [Genitori si Diventa (Becoming Parents)] and the social-health service specialized on adoption working in Rome. All the participants lived in the following cities of the Center of Italy: Rome, L’Aquila, and Teramo.

The eligible criteria for this study were the following: age range of late-adopted adolescents between 11 and 16 years old, age of adoption after 4 years of age, length of placement equal to 4 years at least (considered a sufficient length of time for stabilizing adoptive child–parent relationships, van den Dries et al., 2009 ), absence of children’s special needs, absence of maternal clinical diseases, parents with medium-to-high education level, married couples still living together, and families living in urban contexts.

This study included 76 participants: 46 late-adopted adolescents (23 female) and their 30 adoptive mothers. Of the adolescents, 14 were “only” children, while 32 were siblings both involved in the study. 21 mother–child dyads had already participated in a longitudinal study ( Pace and Zavattini, 2011 ; Pace et al., 2012 ). The pre-adoption histories of the adoptees were characterized by severe adversities, such as serious neglect, physical maltreatment, sexual abuse, and widely variable periods of institutionalization.

Variables and Measures

Late-adopted adolescents, adolescents’ attachment representations.

Attachment representations of adolescents were assessed using the Italian version of the FFI ( Steele and Steele, 2005 ), authorized by the author Howard Steele. The FFI is a semi-structured interview informed by, yet distinct from, the AAI ( Main et al., 2008 ). Interviews are video-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The FFI’s coding system comprises eight scales, each including subscales as follows: (1) Coherence , based on Grice’s well-known maxims of good conversation—truth, economy, relation, and manner, and overall coherence; (2) Reflective Functioning —developmental perspective, theory of mind, diversity of feelings; (3) Evidence of Secure Base —father, mother, and other significant figure; (4) Evidence of Self–Esteem —social competence, school competence, and self-regard; (5) Peer Relations —frequency of contact and quality of best friendship; (6) Sibling Relations —warmth, hostility and rivalry; (7) Anxieties and Defense —idealization, role reversal, anger, derogation, adaptive response; and (8) Differentiation of Parental Representations .

The interview also includes the following global attachment classifications (Steele et al., unpublished): (1) secure classification indicates that the person’s narrative reflects flexibility, ease, and ability to turn to others for support when in distress; (2) insecure-dismissing classification describes people who use derogation or idealization as a defense and show restriction when they have to acknowledge or express distressing feelings; (3) insecure-preoccupied classification describes adolescents rated highly in anger or passivity; and finally, (4) insecure-disorganized classification describes people showing some lapses in monitoring or reasoning as well as contradictory or incompatible strategies in the attachment narratives.

The scales are scored on a 7-point scale from 1 to 4 (1 = no evidence; 2 = mild evidence; 3 = moderate evidence; 4 = marked evidence), including mid-points.

In the FFI coding system, the interviews have both a final classification (the above-mentioned secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized categories) like in the AAI and a scoring (1–4) for each classification, which is unlike the AAI. This double coding system captures attachment representations both at categorical and dimensional levels.

For this study, two blinded raters (both trained by Howard Steele and reliable coders for the FFI) coded 14 of the 46 interviews (30.4%). Inter-rater agreement was 100% ( k = 1, p < 0.001) on the four-way classification system (secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized). Spearman’s rho correlations for the five coherence scales ranged from 0.66 for the relation scale ( p < 0.05) to 0.86 for the manner one ( p < 0.01). The other FFIs were coded only by one trained coder. To our knowledge, this is the first study assessing attachment representations of late-adopted adolescents with the FFI in Italy.

Adolescents’ Cognitive Status

Given the contrasting findings on the links between attachment representations and cognitive level of participants at developmental stages ( Steele and Steele, 2005 ; Stievenart et al., 2011 ; Beijersbergen et al., 2012 ; West et al., 2013 ), we assessed the verbal intelligence of late-adopted adolescents.

Participants’ verbal IQ was measured by the vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (verbal WISC-III, Wechsler, 1991 ; Italian validation, Orsini and Picone, 2006 ) for participants aged between 6 and 16 years and 11 months. The verbal WISC III consists of the following subtests: information, similarities, arithmetic reasoning, vocabulary, comprehension (CV), memory figures. The child’s verbal IQ is obtained from the sum of the weighted points of the first five verbal subtests, while the factor score of verbal CV is obtained based on the weighted score received in the last subtest.

Adoptive Mothers

Maternal attachment states of mind.

The states of mind with respect to attachment of adoptive mothers were assessed through the AAI (George et al., unpublished; Main et al., unpublished), a well-known and semi-structured interview with 20 questions lasting approximately 1 h. The AAIs are audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The transcripts were used to assess possible past experiences with attachment figures in infancy (Loving, Rejection, Neglecting, Role Reversal, and Pressure to Achieve) and current states of mind (Idealization, Lack of Memory, Anger, Derogation, Passivity, Transcript Coherence, Mental Coherence, Metacognitive Monitoring, Fear of Loss, Unresolved Loss, Unresolved Trauma) on 25 1-to-9 scales.

The coding system classifies attachment states of mind into one of three principal categories: (1) free-autonomous and secure (F/A), where individuals freely describe their attachment experiences with balance and coherence; (2) insecure-dismissing (Ds), where they are unable to give evidence for the positive evaluations of their parents showing idealization or normalization strategies; (3) insecure-preoccupied (P), where they use angry or vague language when talking about their attachment relationships. One of two transversal categories can also be added: insecure-unresolved/disorganized loss or trauma (U), where transcripts presented lapses in monitoring of reasoning or discourse or reports of extreme behavioral reactions during discussion of these specific topics, or cannot classify (CC), where completely contradictory attachment patterns (e.g., dismissing/entangled) emerged.

Psychometric studies in many countries have shown that attachment classifications provided by the AAI are steady across periods of up to 15 months and are independent of the interviewer. The AAI categories were not correlated with the interviewees’ cognitive level, social desirability, memory, or general discourse style ( Bakermans-Kranenburg and van IJzendoorn, 1993 ; Crowell et al., 1996 ).

For our study, all the AAIs were coded by a reliable coder. For inter-rater reliability, 10 interviews (30%) were also classified by another expert evaluator. Both coders were trained by Deborah Jacobvitz and Nino Dazzi and they were provided with AAI’s reliability and unaware of the other data collected. Inter-rater agreement was 88% ( k = 0.77, p < 0.01) for four-way classifications (free-autonomous, dismissing, entangled, or unresolved). Spearman’s rho correlation of 0.72 was found for the coherence of transcript’s scale ( p < 0.05), 0.74 for coherence of mind ( p < 0.05), and 0.97 for unresolved loss ( p < 0.01).

Socio-demographic and Adoption Data

Ad-hoc questions were developed for this research and they were answered by adoptive mothers to collect personal data (age of birth, education level, year of marriage, etc.) and information concerning the details of adoption (children’s age at arrival, country of origin, length of adoption, pre-adoption information, etc.). A part of this sheet was designed to investigate the children pre-adoption histories, especially the motivations for which they were placed for adoption (e.g., parental abandonment, death, drug abuse, etc.) and the events leading to change of guardianship, such as neglect, physical and sexual abuse, institutionalization, and multiple placements. In the last part we asked about physical condition, mental retardation, and psychiatric diagnoses of the children.

Maternal psychopathology

Before adoption, parents seeking to adopt were assessed to examine their psychopathological risk, but at the time of this study’s assessment, some years had passed since this pre-adoption selection. Therefore we checked the psychopathology level of adoptive mothers to ensure they were free from mental disorder symptoms and no psychological problems had emerged after adoption.

Mental health problems of mothers were measured using the Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, 1994 ), a 90-item standardized instrument designed to measure current symptom severity grouped in 10 main symptom dimensions (somatization, obsession-compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, psychoticism, and other symptoms, such as problems with sleep) and an index of psychopathology (Global Severity Index, GSI). This measure provides a reliable estimate of the likelihood of being diagnosed with a mental health disorder ( T score above 63 on the GSI for any two symptom dimensions).

The data were collected during a session lasting approximately 2 h at the university’s laboratory. Mothers and children were assessed separately: the FFI and the WISC-III were administered to the adolescents, while the AAI, the socio-demographic questionnaire, adoption sheet, and the SCL-90 were used with their adoptive mothers. Participation in this research was voluntary. Before the session, written informed consent was obtained from all families. The research protocol had been previously approved by the University Ethical Committee.

Data Analysis

Results were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS, Version 21.0). We decided to use primarily non-parametric tests, which are appropriate for variables of this type because they do not require that the sample is drawn from a normally distributed population ( Siegel and Castellan, 1988 ). The significance level for all analyses was set at p < 0.05.

First, we presented descriptive statistics of all of the study variables and then we investigated whether FFI and AAI classifications were associated with background and control variables. Next, we tested the study’s hypotheses with respect to the association of attachment between mothers and late-adopted adolescents. Specifically:

(1) We examined the concordance between adoptive mothers’ AAI categories and late-adopted adolescents’ FFI categories on the two-way system (secure–insecure) and, when possible, three-way (secure, dismissing, and preoccupied) and four-way systems (secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized). Using multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then tested whether FFI attachment category of late-adopted adolescents could be predicted by taking into account mothers’ AAI categories.

(2) We examined the correlation between late-adopted adolescents’ FFI scales and adoptive mothers’ AAI state-of-mind scales (especially coherence scales considered to be the best predictors of free-autonomous classifications). Using linear regression analyses, we then tested whether FFI scales of late-adopted adolescents could be predicted by taking into account mothers’ AAI state-of-mind scales.

Descriptive Variables

Table 1 presents descriptive results concerning background variables and attachment classification for both adolescents and mothers.

TABLE 1. Child and mothers demographic and adoption characteristics.

Late Adopted Adolescents

The statistical analyses with adolescents’ FFI categories were conducted using a secure vs. insecure partition with preoccupied adolescents included in the insecure group together with dismissing ones. Adolescents’ FFI classifications were not associated with gender ( p = 0.35), continent of origin ( p = 0.10), age at arrival ( p = 0.50), length of adoption ( p = 0.60), age at assessment ( p = 0.27), educational level ( p = 0.26), or presence or absence of siblings ( p = 0.69). However, secure adolescents ( M = 104.39, SD = 23.62) showed a significantly higher level of verbal IQ ( T = 3.49, df = 44, p < 0.01) than insecure ones ( M = 79.67, SD = 20.05). Hence, we decided to include verbal IQ as a covariate in the regression model.

The statistical analyses using maternal AAI categories were conducted using a free-autonomous vs. non-free-autonomous partition with dismissing mothers included in the non-free-autonomous group together with unresolved ones. Mothers’ AAI classifications were not associated with age ( p = 0.87), years of education ( p = 0.28), length of marriage ( p = 0.16), or level of psychopathological symptoms ( p = 0.13).

Attachment IWMs in Adolescent-Mothers Dyads

Classifications.

Table 2 presents the distributions of the attachment classifications of adoptive mothers’ AAI and late-adopted adolescents’ FFI.

TABLE 2. The concordance between adolescents’ FFI and maternal AAI classifications 1 .

We found a significant of 70% (32 dyads) on the two-way AAI and FFI systems (rphi = 0.31, p = 0.04) and a concordance of 61% (28 dyads) on the four-way system approaching significance (χ 2 = 8.29; df = 4, p = 0.08). To further examine the possibility of interaction, we conducted multinomial logistic regression analyses predicting adolescents’ secure–insecure FFI categories from mothers’ AAI free-autonomous vs. not-free-autonomous, adding verbal IQ as a covariate. The multinomial logistic regression model indicated that free-autonomous adoptive mothers showed a tendency to have secure late-adopted children (β = 1.42, p = 0.08), although adolescents’ high verbal IQ appeared to be a better predictor of their secure classification (β = 0.05, p = 0.01).

Table 3 shows the correlations between the FFI and the AAI state-of-mind scales.

TABLE 3. Spearman’s correlations between the AAI and the FFI scales.

The FFI scales were highly correlated with verbal IQ scorings ( r between 0.35 and 0.63, p < 0.01), while no correlations were found between maternal AAI scale of states of mind and adolescents’ verbal IQ scorings ( r between -0.17 and 0.29, p = ns). Based on these correlations, we ran two linear regression analyses (Table 4 ). The first entered the secure pattern as the dependent measure and the second entered the disorganized pattern as the dependent variable. For both regressions, we inserted coherence of transcript, coherence of mind, and idealizing father as independent variables; for the first two, we added unresolved loss in the independent blocks. Verbal IQ was added as a covariate.

TABLE 4. Regression model predicting adolescents’ secure and disorganized FFI scales from maternal AAI states-of-mind scales.

The regression summary indicated that high coherence of transcript and low unresolved loss of adoptive mothers could predict high secure attachment of their late-adopted children, even if the adolescents’ verbal intelligence made a significant contribution to their prediction. Moreover, high cognitive status of adoptees made a significant contribution to the prediction of low scores on their disorganized patterns of attachment.

Our sample of late-adopted adolescents was classified through the FFI with 67.4% as secure, 26.1% as dismissing, 6.5% as preoccupied, and none disorganized, showing attachment representation distribution overlap with those both from the Italian AAI meta-analysis of non-clinical adolescent samples ( Cassibba et al., 2013 , 62% free-autonomous, 24% dismissing, 10% preoccupied, and 4% unresolved), and adoption studies using the AICA ( Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ) and the FFI ( Barcons et al., 2012 ; Stievenart et al., 2012 ). These data confirms that adoption can be seen as a positive intervention also for late-adopted children who were considered a high risk group due to their adverse pre-adoption experiences.

Concerning the distribution of AAI classifications of adoptive mothers, we found a high percentage of free-autonomous classifications (70%), similar to those in the Italian AAI meta-analysis of non-clinical mothers ( Cassibba et al., 2013 , 62% free-autonomous, 24% dismissing, 10% preoccupied, and 4% unresolved-disorganized), post-adoption studies including parents assessment ( Steele et al., 2008 , 2010 ; Barone and Lionetti, 2012 ; Pace et al., 2012 ), and studies on couples seeking to adopt ( Cavanna et al., 2011 ; Calvo et al., 2015 ; Pace et al., 2015a ).

We found a significant concordance between the attachment states of mind of adoptive mothers using the AAI and the attachment representations of late-adopted adolescents using the FFI (70% for two-way and 61% for four-way attachment classification). This result confirmed findings from most of the studies on adoptions, although some research did not find significant associations (Table 5 ).

TABLE 5. Studies assessing attachment concordance between adopted children and their mothers.

We would suggest that maternal attachment states of mind, characterized by highly coherent narratives of their own attachment relationships, could be very beneficial for their children via several pathways. First, attachment security of mothers in the AAI is usually associated with both physical and emotional availability, responsiveness, acceptance, and cooperativeness ( Allen et al., 2003 ; Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ; Scherf et al., 2013 ). We would suggest that these maternal behaviors may teach children to feel confident in considering their own and others’ feelings, and to build their own security and self–esteem. Second, free-autonomous adoptive mothers may be more capable of managing and tolerating their children’s separation process during adolescence without experiencing adolescents’ autonomy and exploration behaviors as an attack on the mother–child relationship. Third, free and autonomous adoptive mothers, who are able to coherently integrate their own past attachment history, may be especially good at helping their children to process their early negative and traumatizing experiences and integrate them coherently into their personal biography ( Pace et al., 2012 ). Palacios and Brodzinsky (2010) pointed out that the construction of personal identity becomes even more significant for adopted teenagers, since, during adolescence, connecting the past, the present, and the future in a single and coherent story becomes central and requires the processing and integration of their own story both in adopted children and their parents. On the other hand, adoptive mothers with insecure attachment states of mind, in our study classified as dismissing or unresolved, mostly had insecure children. These data indicated that mothers with low coherence and high unresolved loss would fail to transmit to their late-adopted children the emotional security required for self-confidence and relationally competence ( Scharf et al., 2012 ), and they could be less capable of reducing the impact of their negative past experiences. However, surprisingly three secure adopted adolescents, despite their free-autonomous secondary classification, had unresolved adoptive mothers. From a clinical perspective, it is interesting to mention two points to explain this counter-intuitive data: on one hand, these adoptive mothers were among the few involved in psychotherapeutic treatment in their young adulthood; on the other hand, the three secure adolescents were among the few in our sample who were placed in foster care after the abandonment from biological parents, without experiencing any institutionalization. We would suggest that these protective factors could reduce the impact of the unresolved states of mind of the adoptive mothers on the attachment representation of their adopted children.

Finally, attachment security is overrepresented in late-adopted adolescents with high verbal cognitive scores. This result, in line with findings on early adopted children ( van Londen et al., 2007 ), seems intriguing at different levels. First, our data may indicate a problem with the discriminant validity of the FFI: the more advanced the child’s verbal abilities are, the better she or he is able to describe and talk about attachment relationships, leading to an overrepresentation of attachment security ( Atkinson et al., 1999 ). However, this interpretation does not seem to be confirmed by a study with non-clinical samples ( Steele and Steele, 2005 ). Moreover, controlling for verbal IQ, the relationship between AAI and FFI remained significant and this favored the content and the discriminant validity of the FFI. A second hypothesis could be that, unlike the adult sample, where attachment representations and verbal intelligence were completely distinct domains ( Crowell et al., 1996 ), among adopted adolescents, attachment may be related to cognitive development, as revealed among non-clinical children ( O’Connor and McCartney, 2007 ; Kerns, 2008 ; West et al., 2013 ). Lastly, we would suggest that late-adopted adolescent showing high verbal IQ may represent another factor that can help them build their secure attachment representation together with maternal attachment security (adopted children with high verbal IQ may be able to easily learn new habits in adoptive families, etc.). Further studies are needed to investigate whether the correlation between attachment classifications by the FFI and verbal intelligence also holds in normative samples.

Limitations and Future Developments

This study had several limitations. First, the restrictive eligibility criteria (absence of children with special needs in the sample, low maternal psychopathology, medium-to-high maternal education level, married couples living together) to take part in the study are a limitation for the generalizability of results and they could explain the low rate of insecure attachment in our sample, which was comparable to the rate of the non-adoptive adolescent population. Second, our sample size was quite small and it was not homogeneous (adolescents’ age, age at adoption, children’ country of origin, etc.). Third, fathers’ assessments were lacking in our study. Fourth, the correlational nature of the research design did not allow causal inferences. Lastly, the voluntary participation of adoptive families might have self-selected more sensitive families. Further research is needed to replicate our findings with larger and more uniform samples, using longitudinal research design, and including fathers’ assessment.

First our results highlighted a concordance of attachment representations among adoptive mother–child dyads during adolescence, endorsing results of some previous studies (e.g., Barone and Lionetti, 2012 ) on late-adopted children during childhood, and indicating that a relationship with a secure mother may represent a very beneficial experience for the late-adopted adolescents, despite their hard past-experiences. Second, we found a correlation between adolescents’ attachment security and verbal IQ that deserves to be investigated in further studies to assess whether it also holds in normative samples.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : attachment, adoption, adolescence, internal working models (IWMs), Friend and Family Interview

Citation: Pace CS, Di Folco S, Guerriero V, Santona A and Terrone G (2015) Adoptive parenting and attachment: association of the internal working models between adoptive mothers and their late-adopted children during adolescence. Front. Psychol. 6:1433. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01433

Received: 30 April 2015; Accepted: 08 September 2015; Published: 23 September 2015.

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Copyright © 2015 Pace, Di Folco, Guerriero, Santona and Terrone. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Cecilia S. Pace, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Genoa, Corso Podestà 2, 16128 Genoa, Italy, [email protected]

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Open access
Published: 12 November 2019

Why technology adoption succeeds or fails: an exploration from the perspective of intra-organizational legitimacy

Min Ren 1

The Journal of Chinese Sociology volume 6 , Article number: 21 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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This paper constructs an intra-organizational legitimacy analysis framework to reveal the conditional mechanisms of technology adoption at the organization level. A retrospective look on a 9-year application process of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) in a Chinese state-owned enterprise shows how the application effects of an adopted technology fluctuate with changes to intra-organizational legitimacy, which itself is composed of performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy. This research indicates that gaining sufficient legitimacy is one necessity for the success of technology adoption in organizations. Basically, performance legitimacy determines how far technologies can be transferred into the corporate sector. When a new technology adoption starts with performance uncertainty, task legitimacy ensures organizational resource investments that serve to initiate and accelerate technology adoption. Value legitimacy, on the other hand, ensures informal resource input, which preserves the technology during crises for future possible reuse and advances the application when used.

Introduction

What are the key factors affecting an organization’s adoption of an exogenously resourced technology? Researchers have three ways to answer this question, based essentially on different points of emphasis, including emphasizing technical factors (Davis 1986 , 1989 ; Davis et al. 1989 ; Venkatesh 2000 ), technical-organizational match (for instance, Majchrzak and Paris 1995 ; Hong and Kim 2002 ), or organizational factors (Zhen et al. 2012 ; Li 2002 ; Sarker and Lee 2003 ; Yin and Chen, 2009 ; Huang 2010 ; Tan et al. 2015 ).

Emphasizing technological factors, TAM (technology acceptance model) and ID (innovation diffusion) focus on the technological characteristics implying that they determine the results of technology adoption, but this cannot explain the puzzle of why “one technology package has two outcomes” (Martinsons 2004 ). Researchers documenting the organizational perspective go too far, ignoring or even denying the technological factors that cause swinging from the technology imperative end to the technology powerless end, and they only vaguely consider organizational variables such as institutions, politics, or culture, which they mainly assumed were consistent and integrated. As for the technology-organization match perspective, matches are considered static or hard to change if they are not given.

Despite the existence, however, of considerable documented research as either static mechanisms mostly exploring quantitative causal relationships between concerned variables or dynamic mechanisms like qualitatively describing application processes for how political and institutional factors captured technology application, they categorized three dominant outcomes: success, partial failure, or total failure. But this three-way categorization did not cover all cases (Heeks 2002 ). For example, where should one place a “failure-followed-by-success” case? And this is without even mentioning inner-case comparative research.

This paper investigates a case of ERP adoption in a Chinese state-owned company as complementary research. I draw data from three participant observations, more than 50 in-depth interviews, almost 100 questionnaires at a big Chinese state-owned company (pseudonym Da Company) from August to October in 2008, in January 2013, and in April 2016. The list of the key personnel for interviews was obtained through snowball sampling in which the important participants in the ERP adoption process served as the starting point. I conducted a follow-up investigation by phone of those who left due to job-hopping. All the names in this article are pseudonyms, too. The related public reports have been dug up as well.

Data analysis demonstrates how the organization and the adopted information technology and adoption were dynamically and mutually constructed in a changing environment, which influenced the intra-organizational legitimacy of technology in the adoptive organization and correspondingly affected the periodic results of technology adoption. If the intra-organizational legitimacy of an adopted technology is still changing, final stable results will not be obtained. The technology I studied is ERP, enterprise resource planning, an exogenously sourced information technology for the organization, which means it was totally new, and there was no recognition consensus when it was adopted by the organization (Qiu 2005 ).

This case is special for the ERP adoption research, for it is an exact “failure-followed-by-success” information technology adoption case, and it is adequate for doing an inner-case comparison. Specifically speaking, the ERP adoption underwent a 9-year fluctuating process, from starting-up and almost being abandoned to restarting and then success—the four successive phases—from suspected failure to final success. This allows for an inner-case comparison study in which the inner organization environment at all stages are to a great extent comparable, making for a quasi-experiment for the researcher to detect what had been changed and how it connected with the rise and fall of periodic results in adoption project. From this, I conclude the conditional organizational mechanisms to answer the research question.

After a literature review, I construct a theoretical framework for the intra-organizational legitimacy of technology; then, I describe the case of the 9-year process of a Chinese state-owned enterprise implementing ERP. I then analyze the covariation between the intra-organizational legitimacy of technology and its periodical implementation results. In the end, I make conclusions and discussions.

Literature review

Previous literature can be categorized into three ways to answer why information technology adoption fails or succeeds.

Some documents emphasize the effect of technological characteristics on technology adoption outcomes, such as cognitive usefulness and ease of use in TAM (Davis 1986 , 1989 ; Davis et al. 1989 ; Venkatesh 2000 ), as well as the relative superiority, compatibility, complexity, testability, and observability of technologies in ID (Tatnall 2011 ). It seems plausible that technical application research should focus on technological features, but this does not explain why the same technology used in different organizations may lead to different outcomes—the so-called “one technology package has two (organizational) outcomes” puzzle (Martinsons 2004 ). Thus, technology adoption must be concerned with organizational factors or the relationships between technology and organization.

The research dealing with organization-side factors can be mainly divided into two perspectives. The first focuses on the effect of organizational managerial elements on technology adoption, including the material environment, like existing organizational IT capabilities/infrastructure (Holland and Light 1999 ; Yin and Chen, 2009 ) and non-material administrative factors such as leadership, communication, and team empowerment (Sarker and Lee 2003 ; Ke and Wei 2008 ). The second explores the impact of wider-perspective factors on technology implementation, such as organizational management strategies (Aladwani 2001 ; Yusuf et al. 2004 ), organizational culture (Davison 2002 ; Ke and Wei 2008 ; Jones et al. 2006 ; Zhen et al. 2012 ), politics within organizations (Skok and Legge 2002 , Tan et al. 2015 ), and the institutional environment where the organization is embedded (Huang 2010 ; Seo 2013 ), and it is usually inclined to explore how such factors hindered technology implementation.

As to the relationship between organizations and technology in technology adoption, there also exist two perspectives. First is the static O-T match, focusing on to what extent the requirements of information technology (e.g., ERP) for an organization are met from the existing organizational technological data basis, user interface friendliness to administrative process match (Zhang 2009 ), as well as organizational structures accommodation (Wang 2009 ). The concept of “match” implies meeting the requirements between technology and the adopting organization, and it allows for minor adjustments on the organizational side and great changes on the technological side. So if there is no match, technology will be resisted by an organization (Hong and Kim 2002 ; Rajapakse and Seddon 2005 ), leading to adoption failure (Heeks 2002 ). Second, a dynamic interaction mechanism is constructed mainly from a sociological perspective. This tradition started with Barley’s research (Barley 1986 ) applying structuration theory to CT scanner adoption in two hospitals, after which a structural model of technology use was developed (Orlikowski 1992 ). Later, Qiu ( 2005 ) developed a mutual-structuring mechanism by excluding contingency traits.

Most related literature comes from management, including information systems management and organization management (Finney and Corbett 2007 ). Compared to the management discipline that solves specific management problems, the sociology of technology explores deeper, more profound and holistic abstract mechanisms; management science tries to obtain the best practice for technology implementation, while sociology is more interested in complex practical operations. For example, the former usually assumes that the benefits or culture of an organization are integrated, while sociology always sees political and fragmented—even conflicting—interaction. For example, information technology adoption is based on institutional logic rather than efficiency logic (Huang 2010 ), and organizational change is not efficiency-improvement oriented but acts upon the logic of interests and power (Tan et al. 2015 ). Compared to management and information science, sociological literature has been scarce, and its research issues are very limited (Qiu 2017 ). For some reasons, since the 1990s, there have been no substantive breakthroughs in the field (Zhang 2009 ), with sociology gradually becoming even more marginal (Zammuto et al. 2007 ).

To summarize the sociological point of view, it emphasizes that, first, technology is essentially regarded as a tool to reveal the operational logic of an organization. Second, technology adoption is the input of technology as well as the input of a specific organizational structure. New technology usually conflicts fiercely with existing formal structures, managerial or technical, of the adopting organization. The existing research leaves some gaps, however. For example, first, when technology and an organization fiercely conflict in structure, the technology is sometimes completely repelled from the organization, just as any other common project fails in an organization; but in reality the conflicts—some quite fierce—between technology and organizations do not necessarily lead to a failure of the technology’s adoption. Examples of this are common; so what exactly might support technology to survive the violent mutation process of adoption? Second, existing literature revealing the logic of institutions, interests, and power in organizations against technology cannot explain why the success rate of information technology adoption continues to rise. Obviously, in the field of technology adoption research, the logic of efficiency has not attracted as much sociological attention as it deserves. When organizations are treated as institutionalized puppets, the rationality of organizations and the pursuit of their goals are discarded from research in sociologists’ eyes. We do not think this is appropriate to explain organizational activities, especially for technology adoption in business organizations, which are essentially as rational as possible in organizing resources in pursuit of performance goals. As a sociologist, it may be more legitimate to explore the idea of efficiency rather than measurable efficiency. In this case, I probe how people consider potential efficiency at various times during the technology adoption process. Third, when the operations of an organization are simplified to a power contention, the members of the organization are assumed to be self-beneficiaries. It is as though they never consider the interests of the organization. Is this an over correction of the “organization-socialized people” hypothesis from the classical stage of organization research?

Therefore this study attempts to be complementary and fill these research gaps. From a sociological perspective, I explore how organizational members’ recognition of technology affects technology adoption results, including failure and success.

The adoption of complex, new technology at an organization is always highly uncertain and risky in terms of its success, and it is mostly adopted with an expectation for performance improvements, especially at businesses. Considering the gap between an administrative order and the real operations of an organization, it is reasonable to say that the subjective validity—that is, people’s belief and recognition—of the adopted technology is essential for the technology’s implementation before its performance promise comes fully true. This forms the direct environment for the technology’s implementation, which can be conceptualized as the legitimacy of the technology within an organization. It is necessary to explore this issue, for people’s understanding and support of new things are directly related to their ability to mobilize resources (Bergek et al. 2008a , 2008b ; Hekkert et al. 2007 ; Rao 2002 ). And sufficient resource input is of utmost importance for the survival of an adopted technology in an organization (Markard et al. 2016 ). The internal legitimacy of an organization provides cognitive and attitude-based support, which affects the resources procured by organizational members in their activities (Human and Provan 2000 ).

For a long time, however, the issue of the legitimacy of new technologies within organizations has been neglected by academics. This is probably related to academic inheritance, as legitimacy analyses are always used to study the macro-level of organization-environment relations. Legitimacy has traditionally been used to refer to the compatibility between organizations and the environment (laws, norms, values, beliefs, practices, expectations, etc.), but legitimacy is itself a strongly explanatory concept (Gao 2000 ), partly due to the vagueness and richness of its meaning. Legitimacy is assessment according to certain standards usually defined as a set of constructed norms, values, beliefs, and practices (Scott 2008 ; Suchman 1995 ) or it is defined as something that has a collective basis making it recognizable, recognized, or accepted (Gao 2000 ). Norms, values, convictions, and a basis refer specifically to different things according to specific research objects and research situations, which allows the interpretative power of legitimacy to be widely used in various fields of politics, sociology, anthropology, histology, etc. Such research is mainly confined to the macro or meso research levels.

Some scholars have explored or mentioned technology’s intra-organizational legitimacy (Brown 1995 , 1998 ; Qiu 2005 ; Huang 2010 ), but empirical research has been rare. Brown ( 1995 , 1998 ) reveals how technology supporters manipulate the symbolic micro-political process of technology’s organizational legitimacy. The problems, however, that have not yet been discussed are, first, how the organizational legitimacy of technology adoption is assumed to exist without question; second, no research has been conducted on the classification of organizational legitimacy; and third, organizational understanding of technology has been reduced to the redistribution of benefits and power, and technology’s significance in promoting organizational performance has never been explored.

Based on the above context, the question in this paper is whether the legitimacy of technology in the adopting organization affects technology adoption. If yes, why and how? What are the main forms of intra-organizational legitimacy for technology, and what are the possible mechanisms? This article explores the adoption of technology from the perspectives of the members of an organization, emphasizing how the members’ understanding of technology matters but is not simply bounded to their awareness of intra-organizational politics, as sociological scholars always emphasized before.

Regarding legitimacy, I combine existing literature with my interviews of managers and key system users in organizations on their interpretation of the adopted technology—ERP in this case—to conclude three interpretative categories: performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy. I do this to explore these legitimacy issues in technology adoption, including how technical performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy affect organizational effectiveness under different conditions.

Three forms of intra-organizational legitimacy for technology

Organization legitimacy is related to multiple subjects, who assesses and who admits. Internal and external evaluation of organizational legitimacy (Suchman 1995 ; Human and Provan 2000 ) correspondingly produce internal legitimacy and external legitimacy, where external legitimacy refers to the extent to which organizations are accepted in the social environment, and internal legitimacy is the degree to which an organization is accepted by its own members (Human and Provan 2000 ). The existing classification of organizational legitimacy implies two dimensions, who evaluates and the evaluation standards. For example, Suchman ( 1995 ) classifies the legitimacy of organizations into three categories: (a) pragmatic legitimacy based on the practicality of the self-interest calculations of stakeholders, (b) moral legitimacy referring to the normative suitability of mass judgment, and (c) cognitive legitimacy based on the public’s perceived cognition. We cross-evaluate the subject (external observer or internal observer) and its assessment activities (examining the organization’s external activities or activities within the organization) to propose a classification framework with two dimensions: (1) external observers assess organizational environment-oriented activities according to the community’s expectation to gain external legitimacy (Ex-I), such as corporate social responsibility issues; (2) external observers assess the compatibility of internal activities and social norms defining the accuracy concerning the internal organizational operations to get external legitimacy (Ex-II), such as outsiders observing whether an organization, e.g., a hospital, performs professionally, or evaluating the legitimacy of management activities (moral or legal, etc.) within an organization (Ruef and Scott 1998 ); (3) internal observers assess outside-oriented organizational activities to produce internal legitimacy (In-I), which affects the general loyalty of organizational members to their organization and is particularly important for organizations that are in their infancy or periods of crisis; (4) internal observers refer to the norms and values of organizations to examine the internal legitimacy (In-II) of specific organizational activities, like that of new technology adoption, the extent to which affects resource-input decisions. This study focuses on the fourth category of legitimacy—specifically speaking, intra-organizational legitimacy of a technology in an adopting organization.

Regarding legitimacy, there is no uniform standard for investigators to choose dimensions of analysis, and thus it is instead based on specific research proposals and theories (Wang and Zhang 2012 ). This study defines a theoretical framework for intra-organizational legitimacy of an adopted technology into three forms: performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy. They correspond to user assessments and acceptance of technology regarding (a) its hard ability to promote the performance of the organization, (b) its administrative qualifications to consume organizational resources as a sufficiently important organizational task, and (c) its compatibility with the organization’s future development.

Performance legitimacy

Performance legitimacy refers to subjective technical significance rather than an objective performance evaluation of the technology. Thus, performance in this study is not an objective measure of performance, but rather an understanding of it. In practice, there always exists a gap between users’ “subjective” judgments and “objective” professional evaluations, as common users seldom use professional tools when evaluating but use, instead, their “feelings.” In addition, their judgments are mixed with secret conflicts of interest and power machinations.

As some scholars have pointed out, the legitimacy of technology in an organization stems first and foremost from its contribution to organizational performance, which means the technological capabilities of a technology determine its acceptance or rejection in the long run (Grint and Woolgar 1997 ). Performance legitimacy is based on the consensus of organizational members on the improvement of the organization’s performance by the adopted technology. It has no single connotation (Ruef and Scott 1998 ; Yang and Zhao 2013 ; Zhang and Zhu 2016 ) but is all about pragmatism and interests. The core is to assess the indicators of performance, such as whether the technology can improve organizational efficiency, how much it can improve, to what extent it will cut costs, etc. This subjective assessment is what we call performance legitimacy. It is similar to the practical legitimacy of Suchman ( 1995 ) in that it emphasizes the perceptions and attitudes towards (organization or individual) interests, and as a subjective assessment consensus, it forms a supportive power exerting an institutional effect on organizational behavior. The difference is that I focus on internal legitimacy, in which assessors are from the inside, while Suchman ( 1995 ) discusses inner legitimacy on the organizational level and mainly defined by the system/institution from the outside, as had been traditionally done in organizational legitimacy studies.

Performance legitimacy of new technologies from insiders often involves assessments at two levels: external performance evaluations and performance predictions in the adopting organization. This means that insider recognition of technology performance is not limited to within organizations but is also affected by the technology’s reputation in the external technology market as well as other users’ perceptions, especially those in equivalent positions in industry market structures. The former, such as whether the technology industry itself is mature, ranks the selected technology in the supplier market, its successful adoption rate or its influential, successful use-cases in the market, etc., and it is decided by outside user word-of-mouth. The latter, such as whether the technology is suitable for an organization, its cost-benefit ratio, etc., is determined by users in the organization. Both constitute the performance legitimacy of the adopted technology. External performance legitimacy helps determine whether an organization adopts a technology, answering the question of why brand new technologies can be introduced into a performance-minded enterprise organization with their high inherent uncertainty and risk. Their level of external legitimacy also affects the possible room in which they gain internal legitimacy. The higher their external performance legitimacy is, the longer organizational members tolerate their non-performance periods; likewise, their will to endure technical problems during application will be higher. The more innovative a technology is, the more its internal performance prediction relies on external information. In the case of this research, when ERP was adopted, the whole integrated management software industry was quite new to the Chinese market. The adopting company had to rely heavily on external performance legitimacy for reference to decide whether or not to adopt the technology. And later, during a time of crisis, it used performance legitimacy to decide whether or not to keep the application going. We have to say that this paper attempts to limit legitimacy within organizations, but one can never completely rule out the discussion of external technological legitimacy.

Task legitimacy

Task legitimacy represents to what extent hierarchical authority defines the technology as a necessary, compulsory organizational task, and how well the technology can use organizational resources. It legitimizes the technology to force organization members to change. Task legitimacy is mandatory within an organization. It comes from administrative organizational power, and it relies on top-down organizational authority.

Organizational resources are always limited, and organizational members shift resources to organizational tasks that are defined as “required” or a “must,” leaving aside organizational tasks that are relatively optional. Innovative technology adoption are bound to change the behavior of the members of an organization. If the task of using a technology is legitimate enough, the members of an organization will work hard to adapt to the new situation instead of slacking off. If it is not legitimate enough, however, they will tend to resist the necessary changes. If accompanied by a loss of one’s own interests, the technology implementation problem will be used as a tool for bargaining with managers at different levels. “They will say it is not because I have no will to use this technology but rather that it is the technology’s severe problems that hinder its use” (Quiren 0808). Footnote 1 Legitimacy as a task in this case is mainly reflected through three indicators. First is the support from the highest decision-makers, reflected in their open supportive statements, or vice versa. Second are the status fluctuations of the informatization team in charge of the adoption of the information technology. Third are size changes of the team in terms of expansion or contraction. The latter two objective indicators corroborate the previous subjective indicator.

Value legitimacy

This is a firm belief in the necessity of a technology coming from organizational members’ recognition of the technology as satisfying the company’s long-term benefit. It includes their loyalty, responsibility, and sense of mission, which all propel them to do the right things for the organization, even at personal risk. Organization members recognize the adoption of the technology as the trend of the times, believing it to be of great significance for the organization’s future development, thus forming their strong belief that the organization must inevitably adopt the technology. This makes them a strong supportive power of technology adoption and implementation. This form of legitimacy is called value legitimacy because of its implication of conviction. It is essentially derived from Weber’s theory of value-rational action, emphasizing that organizational members are also value-rational agents. It is a mixture of the cognitive legitimacy and moral legitimacy of Suchman ( 1995 ), that is, cognition emphasizes rationality, and professional technicians, overlooking short-term and observable performance considerations, look far ahead upon the strategic significance of the advanced technology for the organization’s future, which causes them to believe in the rationality of using technology at great cost. Moreover, the technicians’ loyalty to the organization gives them the strength to stick to their professional judgment, and the higher their loyalty for their organization, the more likely they are to adhere to their professional understanding, even considering it at the moral (value) level. This in turn drives them to invest informal organizational resources and even personal resources in the technology’s application. As an informal, valuable, and still powerful organizational resource for legitimacy, value legitimacy has been neglected by researchers so far. In this case, we conduct a discourse analysis of the relevant actor’s ERP evaluation of its correlation with the future of organizations to determine whether he harbors value legitimacy.

The relationship and a comparison of the three dimensions

Objectives define organizational actions. They are related to the type of organization—in this case, a business—its distinct performance goals, the original intent for adopting the technology in question, and the efficiency dispute over adopting the technology, etc. All of these considerations indicate that performance legitimacy is essential, as it is the foundation of the overall intra-organizational legitimacy of technologies. The performance of the technology is, however, always uncertain until it is successfully used, which is a common reason for the twists and turns in the promotion of technology application. The legitimacy of the task stemming from the mandatory structural power of the organization, however, makes up for the lack of performance legitimacy, ensuring that enough organizational resources are put into technology application. Despite the uncertainty, a technology’s functionality starts its adoption and accelerates the process later. When the consensus within an organization is that the performance potential of a technology has not yet been met, a technology may be removed as an organizational task, causing a crisis in its adoption. Value legitimacy from professionals and their allies, in the form of informal resources that continue to support the existence of technology within the organization, waits for potential survival opportunities. A comparison of the three dimensions of legitimacy is listed in Table 1 , including their assessment criteria, their power sources, their action points, their mechanisms of action, their effects, and so on.

The differences between the intra-organizational legitimacy dimensions here and those in the previous studies include the following: (1) I link the legitimacy concept with the specific organizational activity and the new technology adoption, emphasizing the practical attributes of technology in adopting organizations but not their abstract and general characters, highlighting the context-dependent practical features of the technology and (2) I highlight the value-oriented logic of the actions of the organizational actors’ by revealing how the value evaluation of technology by the organizational members affect technology adoption.

In summary, the key factor at the organizational level facilitating or hindering new technology application is whether or not it obtains sufficient organizational legitimacy. Furthermore, organizational legitimacy is made up of performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy. Later, I will use this framework to analyze the application of ERP in Da Company to show how the legitimacy of this technology is closely related to its periodic application outcomes.

The process of ERP as applied in Da Company: from “dead” to “alive”

Da Company is a Chinese state-owned company composed of a number of functional departments, such as management, finance, and procurement. They shall be collectively referred to as the platform departments, of which they perform services, staff management, and supervision duties, and they are all subordinate branches/subsidiaries. ERP intended to digitize the entire company’s production and management processes to optimize management. It was applied in the various platform departments and all the subsidiary and branch companies. The company produces civilian and military products, and it is famous for having been the biggest domestic supplier of television sets.

In June 1998, the company tried to purchase all color picture tubes, the very core component for TV sets, on the domestic market, for it had planned to monopolize television production and supply in China. But because its inventory data was not clear, the products could not be set at reasonably competitive, low prices for promotion, which was considered the best effective promotion strategy by the market at the time. As a result, the company’s market share declined. It was clear that the company’s deeply opaque information was its bottleneck in an attempt to fulfill this market solution, hindering the company’s strategy implementation and causing the company’s losses. In December, the company set up an Informatization Management Office (IMO), and Old Yin was designated as the group leader to make the informatization plan. In April 1999, Ji, the board chairman, and general manager decided to introduce the ERP system at Old Yin’s suggestion. In August, Da signed an ERP purchase contract with SAP, the biggest ERP supplier worldwide. In October, the ERP project was scheduled to start, and they called a launch in May 2000 with four modules: Financial (FI), Sales and Distribution (SD), Material Management (MM), and Plant Maintenance (PM). Meanwhile, the consequences of the malicious monopoly strategy in 1998 were completely uncovered. Their profits slipped from 3.15 billion yuan in 1998 to 1.57 billion yuan in 1999, and their profit output in the second half of 1999 was less than 100 million yuan. In May 2000, Ji left the company citing illness, and Yao was appointed as the temporary general manager. In July, 2 months later than expected, Yao officially “pressed the button in person” to “launch” ERP’s application. Old Yin was responsible for project execution.

By January 2001, the company had been operating without performance improvements. This was when Ji returned to the company and regained power, then Yao left. Informatization was the solution to the long-standing management problems, and implementing the plan set by Ji before he left was now his focus as he returned to the company. In March, Ji promoted Old Yin from Informatization Director to Senior Manager of the Integrated Management Department. However, almost every user department complained about the mismatch between ERP and the specific management process, saying that ERP was too manpower-demanding and the unreasonable new business process greatly hindered marketing activities. Ji then doubted ERP and in May redacted Yin’s promotion. “I was demoted from a high managerial position all the way down to a common mass employee” (Old Yin 0809). In June, Old Yin was re-appointed as the director of IMO, returning to his old position. Meanwhile, the company held a meeting for middle management and above. The managers of most of the departments accused the informatization team of excessive human resources use and inefficiency. The cancelation of ERP was proposed, and Old Yin shed tears at the meeting. Footnote 2 From then, ERP’s application entered a three-year period of stagnation. That is, the next-step application plan of ERP was shelved, and the existing financial, sales and purchasing modules were barely maintained at the cost of destructive modification. The data in the ERP system could not be used, and it did not meet data quality standards. The loss of technical staff continued, and the IMO was constantly challenged and questioned. In 2002, the ERP project operations of Da Company caused public concern, and there were rumors that Da had failed in its adoption of ERP. Investigative reports on why and how were issued in the media. But Da Company denied failure.

In July 2004, Ji retired and Yao came back again and assumed the highest command. A few days later, Yao promoted Old Yin as the vice director of the Integrated Management Department, and he announced, “From now on, it is not permitted to discuss how many problems ERP has. Employees may only discuss how to solve these problems. If anyone is in ERP’s way, he’s in my way.” Since then, the ERP project jumped into a stage of rapid development. By December, the largest module, the sales module, had been applied to 203 sales branches throughout the country within 4 months. Then, during the following company restructuring, the IMO was incorporated into the most powerful department at the time, the Management and Supervision Department, and Old Yin served as the vice director and was in charge of informatization as well.

In 2005, Old Yin retired, and his long-time follower Gui took over the post of vice director of the department. He was then promoted to be the director. In the same period, the information technology team expanded rapidly, and the outflow of technicians began to return. At the end of the year, the information team was awarded the “President’s Special Award.” In 2006, informatization entered a period of full promotion, and the information demand of the whole company was in blowout. In March 2008, Da company established Xinyi Software Company, trying to integrate the internal experience to provide enterprise information services for outside customers.

As shown in Fig. 1 , each number represents a key point in time, combining the text in the diagram box to mark the ERP adoption process in the company: the introduction, the launch, the stagnation, the restart, the deep application, and the establishment of a company by the information technology team to provide ERP service to the external market. The arrow in the diagram represents the time axis. The horizontal line represents a basic qualification as an organizational task, indicating the necessity of specific organizational projects to the organization, which determined whether the organization invested resources in it or not. The two vertical dotted lines are used to indicate the relative position of the ERP application in the entire organization task system/ranking. Placement above the horizontal line indicates having more importance than normal organizational tasks; placement below indicates less importance. The fluctuating line is drawn according to the relative position of ERP in the organization’s task system at each time node, giving indications throughout the course of its 9-year adoption how ERP underwent changes in the degree of its importance to the organization.

The process of ERP adoption in Da Company

Changes in multiple forms of intra-organizational legitimacy of the technology, and the ups and downs in its adoption

Introduction: strong external performance legitimacy led to the technology’s introduction.

How did the new technology get into the company? Technology introduction comes at a cost, and a company must first consider its returns. Indices of its technical performance potential, such as the technology’s rank in the industry, its market share and the reputation of the supplier are crucial as company decision-making references. Before an enterprise introduces a technology, technology selection should be carried out. Da Company took a long time to compare and decide upon its ERP supplier. At the beginning of 1999, there were eight manufacturers in product selection, three of which were outstanding and remained after the first round of filtering: Oracle, BaaN, and SAP. Oracle had already cooperated with the company before, and their price was quite attractive. In addition, the finance department tended towards Oracle, as ERP systems typically consider the financial model their core. But BaaN ERP could be technically more customizable in modeling, so process restructuring with the organization would be more convenient, and process reorganization is considered a key and important point of ERP adoption. SAP was the world’s largest ERP supplier. At that time, the ERP market in China had just arisen, and all of the suppliers lacked success stories, which increased the difficulty for the company to make a decision. Finally, it came down to SAP’s comprehensive ranking in the industry. Its largest and first-place ranking was a strong signal of comfort, easing the adopter’s sense of uncertainty in their decision and subjectively helping to satisfy the need for risk-avoidance.

During introduction, ERP had a high degree of task legitimacy in the company, because it was introduced by Ji, the authoritarian decision-maker, as he designated himself as the leader of the project executive team.

The value legitimacy of ERP in this stage was generally not high, coming mainly from Old Yin. He was always a staunch supporter of ERP. An organizational story said that in April 1999, after listening to the 9-h report from Old Yin’s team, Ji decided on ERP adoption immediately. Old Yin’s confidence in ERP application and enterprise informatization was derived from his observation and consideration of ERP for years. In 1992, he went to Germany on a business trip to a supplier company that used ERP and saw how great ERP was in promoting efficient management. After returning to China, he developed an inventory management system for the company, close to the MRP prototype. By the end of 1998, the capital turnover rate of the purchasing department of the company had been cut down from 128 to 21 days. In 1995, he studied MRP for the company and began to investigate ERP in 1997. In contrast, Ji’s expectations for ERP were not because of his understanding of the technology, so actually his attitude was not firm, which led later to his changing decisions on ERP. “ The big boss was skeptical. He just felt the need for something to improve management efficiency, but he was not sure whether that thing was ERP or not... and this turned out to be a problem later ” (Old Yin 0809).

In short, with the support of external performance legitimacy, ERP was introduced into the company, and the organizational decisions coming from the authoritarian big boss endowed it with great task legitimacy. ERP had no value legitimacy, however, from the supreme leader, partly deriving from his ignorance of ERP, which indicated the possibility that when the technology’s adoption would later encounter difficulties, the attitude of the big boss would turn from support to doubt.

Launch/implementation: the same task but different task legitimacy intensities

The company originally planned to launch the ERP project in May 2000, but afterwards, due to the superior authority of the SASAC (the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission) which was against the “uncertain prospects” of the project, Ji suspended ERP. “ At that time in China very few companies adopted ERP, and no one could beat his chest in guarantee (of its effects) ” (Gui 0808). In July, Ji was too ill to preside over the company, so Yao took over instead. Unlike Ji, Yao always had a firm desire for informatization work and considered it in line with the strategic development of the enterprise. With a firmly supportive attitude, he decided to “withstand the pressure to launch ERP” (Old Yin 0809). During his 8-month tenure in office, the staff of the Department of Information Management doubled. During launch, the task legitimacy of ERP was prominent, and this strength directly led to the commencement of ERP’s use. Comparing Ji and Yao, both were the company’s top decision-makers, both were ERP implementation team leaders in favor of adopting ERP, and both encountered objections from superiors, but Ji “suspended” the ERP project while Yao “withstood the pressure” to start it.

Organizational research often associates business decisions with the personal traits of business leaders, such as in entrepreneurship. But in this case, the personal characteristics of the two executives could not explain the behavior differences between the two in the decision-making surrounding the start of ERP use. Ji, in charge of Da Company since 1985 and known as the “iron hand,” had great achievements leading the company to increase its net assets over 300 fold, giving the company the leading role in the household electrical appliance manufacturing industry, so he was honored as the organizational “hero” and even the “father” of the company. Employees described him as “dictatorial” and “hard,” having absolute power over the company. Comparatively, Yao was “moderate,” “gentle,” and only 36 years old when he took over the company in 2001. But decisive and courageous Ji did not insist on his previous decisions on ERP adoption, while the young and gentle Yao started ERP against the same great pressure, even at the beginning of his tenure. Negative comments from superior authorities were undoubtedly important. It is this crisis of technology adoption that forced exposure of the inner understanding and value-belief differences regarding ERP between the two leaders. It can be seen that when faced with a dilemma, formal organizational decisions from the same organizational power level reveal their inner substantive differences, and only decisions with substantive belief, partly based on the knowledge of ERP, can provide resources for technology to survive future difficulties. Though some research has found a lack of knowledge regarding ERP may have led to the failure of ERP implementation (Rajapakse and Seddon 2005 ), I would like to say that different understandings and beliefs may have led to different implementations of the same decision to adopt ERP.

Stagnation: value legitimacy supported ERP through its crisis

Eight months after the launch of ERP, its intra-organizational performance legitimacy had not generally been established yet. In March 2001, Ji returned to control the company again. During the same month, he adjusted the organizational structure, the IMO was merged into the Comprehensive Management and Supervision Department (CMSD), and Old Yin was promoted to be the chief manager of the Department from having been the director of the Office, which was considered a supportive signal to propel ERP adoption. But Ji later kept hearing complaints from his managers whose departments were involved with the four modules of ERP adoption, except for the Financial Department. Take the Sales Department, for example. Because the ERP system did not match with their existing database, the system was slow to respond, and the list-printing load was large, data entry was less timely and not synchronized. This caused an inability to print invoices to merchants on time to deduct their input taxes, subsequently affecting sales. This consequence was undoubtedly very serious in their organizational culture in which sales had undoubtedly been a priority at the time.

The IMO believed, however, that the key to sales performance was in product innovation and market competition, but not sales and promotions, and the short-term inconvenience caused by ERP adoption then was just a “convenient scapegoat” for their wrong market strategy. The truth might be that due to ERP’s application, the data were timely and transparent, squeezing out room to cheat on part of the sales staff and thus triggering their boycott. As in the previous analysis, due to the lack of confidence in ERP and the great value placed on sales, Ji believed the Sales Department manager’s assertion and used the excuse of readjusting organizational structure to dismiss Old Yin from the chief position of CMSD, “ all the way down to the bottom, without any title ” (Old Yin 0809). The IMO again was demoted to a secondary unit. Then a document was issued, ranking the IMO as the “ninth” secondary unit, which had the profound implication of being despised and repelled in Chinese culture since the Great Cultural Revolution. Old Yin’s dramatic promotion and demotion “ caused the followers to be at a great loss ” (Jiali 0809). In June, the company held a meeting for middle management and above, and the Sales Department and Purchasing Department openly and strongly accused the ERP operation. Old Yin shed tears at the venue, which later was considered as a landmark event in the company’s course of ERP adoption, marking the start of the stagnation phase. The task legitimacy of ERP plummeted and staff in the IMO left, resulting in the shrinking of the team from 12 professionals to 3 in a very short time.

ERP was suspended for 3 years. A few modules were barely maintained and destructively modified. According to information technology professionals, the action logic should have been to optimize the production and management process according to the best industrial practices embedded in ERP. But, in fact, all departments were demanding the system modules to be modified to fit the old processes and work habits. The professionals in IMO had to “cater” to customer departments to do even destructive modifications to ERP modules in order to maintain ERP at the minimum level—“ it seems like someone was still using it. ” At that time, the external performance of ERP was equally at risk. At this point, the prevalent description of the ERP adoption dilemma in the Chinese ERP market was, “ If you’re not using ERP, you’re waiting to die. If you’re using it, you’re asking to die. ” The adoption success rate of ERP reported by various media outlets was only 20–30%. Why was ERP not cleared out from Da Company, however, just like the fate of other projects destined to fail?

The survival of ERP depended mainly on the resources invested by Old Yin and his team informally, or even personally. Subjectively, Old Yin always had a rational understanding and firm belief in ERP. He believed that “ It was a big risk to implement ERP, but it was essentially important for the future development of the company. Therefore, we had to use it as soon as possible ” (Old Yin 0809). Objectively speaking, his long-standing professional and loyal reputation in the company and his network provided the minimum resources for ERP maintenance at the lowest level in the company. Yin entered the factory in 1964, worked step by step from the bottom to the middle then upper management and was one of the organizational “heroes.” After he shed tears at the management meeting, the staff of the IMO were drained out and headhunters also tried to persuade him to switch jobs. But he was determined to stay and tried his best to help retain ERP. The resources that Old Yin made full use of his own network to find included looking for the funds necessary for the operation of ERP. At that time, a vice president “secretly” gave Old Yin capital support, “ I found top-ups from Vice president Lan ... I begged him... He sometimes granted me tens of thousands of dollars to do the things that I had to do to save ERP ” (Old Yin 0809). Other resources included the professional technology needed for system adaptation. The loss of professional staff meant that the system’s leftover problems were unsolvable, so Old Yin “cheekily” called those who had job-hopped to other companies “ for their own personal growth ”; it was these “Foreign Corps” that helped to supply necessary technological support for ERP’s adaptation.

“ Any achievement requires sacrifice and extraordinary effort, or else success is impossible. ... And I would like to fight for this cause, as informatization started from ERP and got it going. In this company, ERP is not easy to use. In those days it was like we were just doing something very miserable. Our faces looked very bad ... During that time, the main role I played was for the professional team. I always stood by them, taking responsibility, holding the door. It was me there to bear the leader’s burden and the accusations from other high-ranking managers. But below that ... my team needed to suffer user complaints and obstruction. They came back to report to me. If they asked me for a favor, I would go and beg for others’ support of our work. I checked ... when the information technology was denied by the board, if there was no longer a team in the company willing to fight for it, then no doubt failure would come ... [Because] how could you do this without any resources? ” (Old Yin 0809)

Since the big boss Ji had definitely claimed to no longer support the use of ERP, why were the modules still there running at a minimum level? This was because of the informal resource input driven by the value legitimacy of ERP. The value legitimacy of technology embodies an awareness in the organizational members on the significance of the technology to the organization, and this knowledge can be passed through interpersonal trust, helping to form a company-wide, loose league of value. Vice President Lan’s secret support for the informatization work was based on his trust in Old Yin, his professional judgment and his loyalty to the company. Another reason is that “ ERP was launched by Yao in person. He was the deputy mayor in the city and the first post-doctoral general manager in China then. If he was so supportive to this system, people think, then it might be not so wrong. So even though the situation was very challenging, nobody dared to propose stopping and excluding it completely. Who could predict the future? Normal people made references to able persons. It was also the influence of Yao’s insistence that helped ERP to hang in there ” (Old Yin 0809).

Regarding performance legitimacy, ERP also encountered some self-certification opportunities. First, external successful cases of ERP adoption appeared, such as at Lenovo Company. Later, a large number of reports that emerged on the domestic ERP market played a very good, nurturing role. Second, in 2003, the USA, exclusively relying on ERP for data collection in the anti-dumping investigation of Da Company, demonstrated to the organization the international, high professional reputation of ERP from SAP. “ The Americans said that they could only believe the ERP data... nothing else, so although my (ERP) system was not well run, it couldn’t be easily cut out ” (Old Yin 0809). Regarding internal performance legitimacy, the differentiation of performance legitimacy among user departments also provided some room for the survival of ERP. Among the four modules put into use, the financial module application was relatively good. Although the Finance Department also questioned ERP in June 2001 at the managers’ meeting, the department insisted on trying to make good use of ERP during the following period of stagnation. They made assumptions about the value of technology differently, “ We have the assumption that you eventually need informatization. That the advantages of ERP were not played out does not mean that ERP was the wrong solution, but rather that we may have been using it in the wrong way, though the other departments do not think so. They doubt if it is the right solution ” (Dalin 0808) Footnote 3 This showed how the value legitimacy of ERP in the Finance Department worked.

In short, during its 3 years of stagnation, ERP existed in the organization without task legitimacy and basically without any internal performance legitimacy, mainly due to the differentiation of its value legitimacy among the members of the organization, Old Yin’s team and their value alliance supplying the minimum of informal and even personal resources to help ERP to survive. At the same time, the increase of legitimacy of external performance put uncertainty on the internal performance legitimacy judgment; with the doubtful but not definite denial of ERP, the technology could not be completely excluded, even with no more formal resource inputs.

Restart: task legitimacy was strengthened

After the stagnation period, ERP was restarted by its rocketing task legitimacy.

In July 2004, Yao took Ji’s place to run Da Company. The first thing he decided was to restart ERP, clearly and openly showing his strong will on ERP. “ Whoever gets in the way of ERP, gets in my way ” (Guiren 0808). Subsequently, Yao continued to strengthen the task legitimacy of ERP. First, he clearly and publicly declared his strong supportive attitude. Second, he started the organizational restructuring process of merging the IMO into the No. 1 management department, and he promoted the director of the IMO to be the chief of the department. Third, most departments were required to cut staff, but the informatization technician team were given the right to expand. Fourth, at the end of 2005, the technician team was awarded “the Chairman’s Special Award,” and it gradually expanded from 4 in 2004 to more than 20 in 2005. ERP adoption as an organizational task were given the highest prioritization, and the whole company changed its attitude towards ERP, going from the previous stance of “ blaming each other when there was a problem ” to “ working together to find a solution if there is a problem ” (Dawn 0808). Footnote 4

This process also saw the external performance legitimacy of ERP increase. ERP vendors poured into the market, successful cases of adoption were seen more frequently, and society-wide discussions on enterprise informatization cultivated an understanding of ERP. In terms of internal performance legitimacy, there were two things that changed people’s perceptions and attitudes. First, the technician team managed to apply the sales order management module to 203 sales subsidiaries across the country within 4 months. Once the system was running normally, the company was able to obtain timely sales data for all branches throughout the country, so the technological and management problems that the Sales Department had complained about before were solved. Second, in 2005, the informatization team launched an online procurement bidding system. When the price of raw materials doubled on the market, online bidding made the purchase price of raw materials fall by 19%, and the highest drop rate of subsequent tenders was more than 40%. “ In two hours it helped to save more than 3 million for the company, and someone even joked that it seemed like printing money ... It was very convincing and impressive ” (Guiren 0808).

Regarding value legitimacy, training lectures given by top leaders and managers at all levels in the organization made employees realize that making good use of ERP was of great significance to the development and future of the company. This was an inevitable trend. This understanding spread from the president Yao and Old Yin, who was in charge of the most powerful department, then down through various levels of employment in Da Company and out to the branches. Jian was also a “veteran” of the company like Old Yin. In 2001, he was the sales director of the company. At the managers meeting in June, his opposition to ERP was the fiercest. But by 2005, he summed up his cognitive shift, saying “ My understanding of informatization, including ERP’s adoption, has shifted from not understanding to understanding, to support, and now to firm support ” (Jian 0808).

In short, from the ERP reboot until the end of 2005, Yao always kept strengthening the task legitimacy of ERP, such as through his promotion of who originally was in charge of informatization work to the head of the first power sector, and the informatization technician team expanded fivefold. The development of the external market of ERP helped to increase its external performance legitimacy, and its internal performance legitimacy grew as the sales module showed its ability to improve performance after it was thoroughly used. The value legitimacy of ERP proliferated within the organization, and with the help of the internal training system it trickled down through all levels of employment.

In-depth application: the establishment of internal performance legitimacy

By 2006, technological performance was demonstrated, and the internal performance validity of ERP had been finally established within 6 years. For example, in the procurement department, under the same conditions the procurement cycle shortened from 25 to 30 days to 2 days at the shortest, and the occupation of inventory funds dropped from 15 to 17 billion to 2–3 billion; capital turnover decreased from the original 18 days to 10 days. The Finance Department had continued substituting routine work, like accounting jobs, with the system, so the number of staff kept shrinking while the company grew in size. Take one subordinate of the Multimedia Company as an example, where more than 100 billion in sales only needed 20 financial staff: “ Other companies in the same industry and of the same size but without ERP have financial staff numbering more than 110 people ” (Jiajia 0808).

Technology continued to be used in-depth, which reflected the company’s informatization planning. In 2006, ERP, as the company’s base information technology platform, was completely built, and all departments surrounded the data platform to develop other information technology projects, which made the informatization work within the organization deepen to a stage of platform integration. In 2007, the company’s informatization work focused on integrating ERP with branch projects and diffused it to its global subsidiaries. In 2008, the ERP system started to extend outside to the upstream and downstream of the business line, trying to build an integrated value chain across company boundaries, such as by networking with banks and customs, realizing data exchange with suppliers, etc. Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of the staff of the IMO and the continued return of former employees who left while ERP was stagnating added up to over 80 people by the beginning of 2008 and 120 by the end of the year.

The performance legitimacy of ERP further stimulated task legitimacy to permeate from the board of directors to the Department of Management and Supervision, which was the most powerful department and which was in charge of the informatization work at other user departments and proliferation to every branch/subsidiary. When performance legitimacy and task legitimacy were given, value legitimacy once again demonstrated itself as a deep-rooted dynamic to propel technology use. It meant that even within the same company, under the condition of controlling the technical difficulty of different modules, various departments might use ERP modules at greatly different paces, resulting in varying technological performance.

To make this clear, let us examine the application of FI and PPCO (two modules in ERP) in the Multimedia Company, one branch of Da Corporation. Multimedia Company began using ERP in late 2005. Jiaxun from the Group Finance Department was designated as the director of the Finance Department in Multimedia. He brought a welcoming attitude towards informatization work into practice by “ facing all problems and thinking about how to use information technology to solve them in lieu of other solutions. Let this be the automatic response in our minds. ” He also “ started a revolution against ourselves in the informatization era ” (Jiaxun 0808), saying that “ our biggest goal is to optimize the business with information technology and thus fire ourselves ” (Shaohang 0809). By 2006, to create a shared service center, accounting services were performed by information technology, the staff relocated their work to data analysis and mining, such as business plan monitoring, budget execution supervision, cost reduction analysis, external customer credit management, and risk control. The Finance Department deeply “intervened” in its business to improve it.

Meanwhile, the adoption of the PPCO Modules (Production Planning and Cost) in Multimedia Company experienced a different situation. Easy to understand, the company was mainly engaged in the production of home appliances, and the PPCO module was thus extremely important to the company. Unlike the active attitude in the finance department, however, PPCO was used passively. When the project manager Chao found that some departments did not cooperate in the necessary investigation during the first step, he asked the general manager Xu to endow task legitimacy to ERP. Xu then declared, “ whoever gets in ERP’s way, gets in my way. ” But he also said that “ after all, the administrative order does not help user understanding, as they just behave a little bit more cooperatively under pressure. ” Chao said, “ I cannot actually ask Xu to fire anyone because he’s not cooperating with ERP’s application. ” But what he could do to manage this resistance was to apply gentler and wiser strategies, like “ more rewards, less punishments, ” “ more encouragement, less criticism, ” and “ killing a chicken in front of a monkey ” to help advance the project. He proposed his solution to the situation: “ First, perform ERP stiffly without understanding, then understand and perform it voluntarily, and finally understand and optimize it innitiatively, ” which was quite different from the situation in the Financial Department. The company took extra time otherwise not necessary to use PPCO modules, comparing it to its FI module adoption under the condition of “ controlling the technical complexity differences between the modules, ” even though, “ in fact, the PPCO module company is more essential for the business than the FI module ” (Chao 0809).

To summarize ERP’s application at this stage, its performance legitimacy had been established and its task legitimacy had continued to permeate from the top to the bottom, from the corporation to its branches. While the two forms of legitimacy were steady, value legitimacy showed its independent influence on the promotion of the technology’s adoption.

The effect of technology application and the covariance of technology legitimacy

Above, I demonstrated in detail the changes of intra-organizational legitimacy of ERP, including its performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy. I also demonstrated the reasons for the changes as well as the technology application results affected by the changes. We saw that the overall intra-organizational legitimacy of ERP at every stage of its adoption played a significant role, and in each stage there was one specific legitimacy that played a leading role. But how does the success or failure of technology correspond to its organizational legitimacy? First, how we define the success of technology adoption/application should be discussed.

This is a complicated issue. First, the definition of success or failure is usually based on indices for technical effect or user satisfaction assessments. In other words, either objective perspectives or subjective perspectives are used. Second, when evaluating the effect of technology application, people also argue about whether it is focused on procedural indicators or outcome indicators. For example, when the whole industry defined Da’s failure to implement ERP in 2002, Old Yin did not admit defeat; he argued that “there is still an amount of data running in the ERP system every day,” and “ the technology is still used by people in the company ” (Old Yin 0207). But Ji thought that obviously ERP could not be defined as a success, because the data in ERP could not be used for organizational decisions as it promised. Third, if the evaluation adopted the indices for user satisfaction, there would be the question of whose satisfaction counts, because different users have different understandings of and expectations for technology adoption, which would affect the evaluations. For example, in 2005, before and after the production planning (PP) and controlling (CO) modules were used, the variance rate in cost accounting prediction dramatically dropped from 20 to 0.3%. Both the IMO and the Production Management Department felt that this was excellent, while the board president Yao did not think so because his expected target was 0.1%. Therefore, if the success or failure of a technology adoption is understood as a gradually evolving process of performance, then success or failure cannot be represented by a critical point—a specific value index—but rather is represented by a continuous spectrum. This paper applies the objective assessment method to score the application outcomes at all stages of ERP adoption. The evaluation instrument is the ABCD Evaluation Table, Footnote 5 the internationally used ERP Application Performance Indices from Oliver Wight company.

To summarize the changes in the intra-organization legitimacy of ERP in various stages of application and the effect of the technology adoption, we get the corresponding covariant relationship between them, as shown in Table 2 .

As shown in the table, with the ERP introduction decision as a starting point, in the project launch phase, the increase of the legitimacy at Launch Point 2 (July 2000) is compared to that at Launch Point 1 (May 2000). Under pressure from the higher authority’s disagreement with the new technology adoption, Ji changed his attitude towards ERP from support to hesitancy, which apparently reduced the task legitimacy of ERP and postponed the launch of the project. Comparatively, due to the value legitimacy of ERP in his mind, Yao chose to push the launch button, standing against the pressure from above once he assumed control. It is the enhancement of the task legitimacy from Ji to Yao that put ERP into use. After the technology was launched online in the company, due to internal differentiation of performance legitimacy among customer departments—the Sales Department and Purchasing Department certainly complained more than the Finance Department—in which ERP developed favorable as well as unfavorable strengths, there was almost no change in its hedging. In the stagnant phase, the legitimacy of all dimensions was reduced, the overall technology legitimacy shrank, and the effect of the technology’s application became worse. During the reboot phase, the task legitimacy of ERP was enhanced suddenly and strongly. As a result, a large amount of resources was put into the technology’s application, and its technical efficiency was gradually brought into play. Performance legitimacy was revealed and value legitimacy was also transmitted within the organization from top to bottom. The overall intra-organizational legitimacy of ERP rose, and the application effect of ERP jumped up, with the need for ERP and other information technology in the user department skyrocketing. During the wide-and-deep application stage, the legitimacy of all dimensions kept rising, and the organization benefited from the use of ERP and the whole work of informatization more and more. According to the scale assessment, ERP’s application reached the “excellent” level (≥ 3.5 points). Based on this case, we can safely say that the intra-organizational legitimacy of technology affects an organization’s resource input for specific technology adoption, then affects the result of adopted technology, be it success or failure.

Conclusion and discussion

This study constructs an intra-organizational legitimacy framework to analyze a case of technology adoption/application, trying to uncover the conditional mechanism regarding how the intra-organizational legitimacy of technology affects its adoption results in organizations. This research shows that intra-organizational legitimacy of technology affects the amount of resources that an organization formally invests in the adoption, thus affecting its specific outcome and forming the distribution for the technology’s successful application on a continuum between the two ends of complete failure and extreme success (if we express it figuratively). Therefore, the intra-organizational legitimacy of technology is essential for technology adoption in user organizations. Without a combined and sufficient intensity of performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy, the technology in question has difficulty in obtaining enough user cooperation, making it impossible to be applied successfully. Basically, the introduction of new technology means changes to the degree of restructuring benefits distributions and changes to traditional work routines, and the logic behind employee actions is always a mixture of value (organizational commitment and professional ethics), organizational obligation, and self-interest.

Along the three dimensions of intra-organizational legitimacy of technology, performance legitimacy is the foundation, but the performance of a technology is always uncertain until adoption is completed. The role of task legitimacy lies in arbitrarily suspending performance and cost-benefit uncertainty and inputting organizational resources into the technology’s application, which is the fundamental guarantee for its adoption. The decision-making behavior of the top decision-makers, however, is embedded in the decision-makers and performers, the general organizational structure as well as the specific organizational decision execution, which could cause changes to the decision later. If we use technology adoption as an example, the more uncertain the performance of the technology is, and the less confidence in the decision the decision-makers will have and the more heavily they will depend on feedback later in subsequent execution processes to make possible decision adjustments. Thus, there will be more political room left for negotiation from practitioners at all levels. That is why, in this case, the generally decisive Ji was easily shaken by the upper authorities and then later persuaded by the Sales Department as well, backtracking on his own prior decision in this specific case of ERP adoption. The big boss’ denial resulted in the loss of ERP task legitimacy, causing its stagnation.

At the same time, organizational staff are self-determined and value-oriented agents that do not react simply to administrative pressure nor are bound by job obligations. This implies that these actors invisibly but meaningfully increase or decrease the task legitimacy of technology in practice. As value-oriented actors, an organization’s members’ understanding of the value and significance of technology also plays an important role in technology application. When a technology encounters a task legitimacy crisis, value legitimacy can drive informal resources into technology adoption, supporting it to stay in the organization until a turning point is reached. When performance legitimacy and task legitimacy are certain, however, value legitimacy shows its dynamic role in promoting the substantial application of technology much deeper and wider than would otherwise be possible.

This study contributes theoretical insights in two aspects. Firstly, it does supplemental research in the IT-organization field. (1) It explains why a new technology can be used successfully under the uncertainty of internal and external environments from an organizational legitimacy perspective, revealing how the effect of technology application covaries with the fluctuation of its intra-organizational legitimacy. (2) It constructs a framework for the analysis of intra-organizational legitimacy of technology in three dimensions/forms: performance legitimacy, task legitimacy, and value legitimacy. The three dimensions are compared, which helps to open the black box of the technology-organization interaction process from an organizational legitimacy perspective. (3) In this research, I consider employees as value actors instead of the self-interested purchasers or political players so very often seen in exiting literature. (4) This study also reveals how organizations possibly benefit from the gap between decision-makers and performers as an organizational correction mechanism, of which past IT-organization literature usually explored the harmful aspects it had on IT adoption.

Second, it supplements organization research. (1) Existing organizational legitimacy studies mostly focus on external legitimacy between organizations and their environment, while this study shifts to the insides of organizations, exploring intra-organizational legitimacy. (2) Unlike the various forms of legitimacy in existing literature, either in strategic traditions or in institutional traditions (Suchman 1995 ), the three forms in this research are constructed to explore the internal operation processes of an organization. They are more focused on concrete activities such as, specifically, the technology adoption of organizations in this case. (3) I also cross-evaluate the subjects (external observers or internal observers) and their assessments of objects (examining the organization’s external activities or activities within the organization) to propose a classification framework for organizational legitimacy.

The practice of IT adoption can also be illuminated from this research. (1) For the practitioners of IT application, such as ERP execution consultants, I provide an analysis tool to help detect the legitimacy of a technology, locate the possible sources of resources, and find solutions. (2) It facilitates the broadening of horizons to go beyond the idea that only big bosses or top-level management can decide on technology adoption. The analysis shows that other than big bosses and top-level management, every employee, especially those who have good personal networks and are knowledgeable on the adopted technology, can spread technology legitimacy and mobilize the necessary resources for technology use. (3) Some scholars have pointed out that the lack of knowledge of ERP may have led to its failed implementation (Rajapakse and Seddon 2005 ), but the problem is that it is assumed that the knowledge of the whole organization is integrated and that all members have or have no knowledge of the technology. But actually, people are fragmented in this respect, as some are knowledgeable on the technology while others are not. (4) The internal activity on the technology’s application is embedded in outside market performance and recognition, so it is better to proactively connect the inside key personnel with outside market development to help cultivate potential inside advocates.

What needs to be further discussed in the research is that the legitimacy of technology within an organization is affected by external factors. In this case, regarding task legitimacy, at the very start of adoption, the decision-maker’s preference for ERP from SAP company was defined by its outside global high-tech supplier-market ranking; then during its adoption, when its industry market pressure increased sharply, in addition to the complaints of the Sales Department regarding ERP, the big boss made the decision to withdraw resources invested in the technology adoption and instead put them into marketing and sales. Regarding value legitimacy, how could the professionals hang in there so firmly when the big boss turned down ERP and they suffered much of the blame from user departments? This is because they, like Old Yin, had seen great, successful experiences in the outside world beyond China that helped them to better understand ERP and the future. Thus, they were more determined on the project. Due to this arbitrary choice of perspective; however, this paper is mainly limited to the discussion of intra-organizational legitimacy.

In addition, this research is a case study, so it needs to be cautious of theoretical boundaries and practical situations when the findings are applied. The logic of a case study is, however, not to prove to what extent a case can statistically represent totality but rather to reveal the concrete mechanism of a social/organizational process and to conclude from the case a number of high-quality hypotheses to be tested (Mitchell 1983 ; Small 2009 ). In this case study, I must emphasize that the technology is a platform information technology and the type of organization involved is a large Chinese state-owned conglomerate, which might help to clarify the conditions under which the conclusions are to be further inspected.

Availability of data and materials

The data, mainly qualitative interview manuscripts used in the paper, are reserved by the author, contact the author by [email protected] if needed.

Organizational decisions define the direction of organizational attention. More or less, there is always a gap between organizational decisions and executions. And the decision-makers’ decisions are not independent of other managers or key employees, but are instead embedded in them, relying on the latter’s feedbacks to be aware of where the decisions go. Objectively, this is the organization’s correction mechanism, providing space for bargaining between the executors and the performers. This negotiable leeway is also related to the risk inherent in the decision itself and the decision-makers’ confidence in the decision. The higher the risk involved in the decision, and the less confident the decision-makers are, the more the decision-making correction depends on feedback from executors and task performers, the bigger the bargaining space there would be for executors and performers, and the more likely the decision is to be modified later in the execution process. The adoption of very innovative technologies is a typical case of this.

Old Yin is an iconic person of the informatization process in Da Company. His up and down in career after ERP adoption served as a symbol that signified the key time points of the ups and downs of ERP’s adoption. That Old Yin publicly shed tears because of frustrations in ERP’s application was considered as a profound story in the company’s informatization history. Most respondents in my survey referred to this event, which indicated the difficulties and twists of ERP’s adoption in Da Company.

Dalin was the Chief Financial Officer of the Company.

During the ERP stagnation period, Dawn was the one who actively requested to transfer to the Informatization Management Office from the Procurement Department, which was considered much more rewarding. He was a firm advocate of informatization, and his active “downgrade” in position was the result of a combination his knowledge of the role of information technology on the future of the company and his personal future-oriented career development plan. He had been grown into an important technical backbone and the top management of the company.

The Evaluation Form for ERP was first proposed by Oliver Wight in 1977. It has 20 questions and can be divided into three sections: technology, data accuracy, and system usage. In the second edition, it was given a subgroup of questions concerning “Education and Training.” Now, the second edition is most widely used. The company scores each indicator according to its own ERP application performance, from 0 to 4, representing “no” (this activity must be done but is not currently done), “poor” (the people, processes, data, and systems have not yet met the lowest level of requirements, and if it brings profit, it is extremely low), “normal” (most processes and tools are ready for use but are not fully utilized or have not yet achieved the desired results), “good” (all work is completed as assumed and the designed goals has achieved), “excellent” (the best results wanted have been achieved). Summing up all the values, the result, that is the fulfillment or achievement level of ERP’s application is obtained/signified. The ABCD has four levels: A, ≥ 3.5 points, the planning and controlling business processes are effectively applied from the top management to the bottom personnel throughout the enterprise, and the business process is significantly improved, including enterprise customer service, productivity, inventory, cost, etc. B, 2.5–3.49 points, the new business process is supported by high-level management and is accepted and used by middle-level employment, and the company has gained obvious progress by applying ERP. C, 1.5–2.49 points, the process is mainly used as a materials procurement tool, which greatly promotes inventory management. D, ≤ 1.5 points, the data accuracy of the business process in ERP is poor, and it has little help for actual business management improvement.

Abbreviations

Enterprise Resource Planning

Controlling

Financial Module

Informatization Management Office

Materials Management Module

Plant Maintenance

Production planning

Sales and Distribution Module

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to Frank Dobbin, who did a lot to help restructure the first draft. I also grateful to Zeqi Qiu, Yong Gao, Fuwei Wang, and the peer reviewers for their enlightening comments and suggestions for this paper’s revisions.

This study is funded by the National Social Science Fund (Project No. FSH0001).

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Ren, M. Why technology adoption succeeds or fails: an exploration from the perspective of intra-organizational legitimacy. J. Chin. Sociol. 6 , 21 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-019-0109-x

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The goal of a research proposal is twofold: to present and justify the need to study a research problem and to present the practical ways in which the proposed study should be conducted. The design elements and procedures for conducting research are governed by standards of the predominant discipline in which the problem resides, therefore, the guidelines for research proposals are more exacting and less formal than a general project proposal. Research proposals contain extensive literature reviews. They must provide persuasive evidence that a need exists for the proposed study. In addition to providing a rationale, a proposal describes detailed methodology for conducting the research consistent with requirements of the professional or academic field and a statement on anticipated outcomes and benefits derived from the study's completion.

Krathwohl, David R. How to Prepare a Dissertation Proposal: Suggestions for Students in Education and the Social and Behavioral Sciences . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005.

How to Approach Writing a Research Proposal

Your professor may assign the task of writing a research proposal for the following reasons:

Develop your skills in thinking about and designing a comprehensive research study;
Learn how to conduct a comprehensive review of the literature to determine that the research problem has not been adequately addressed or has been answered ineffectively and, in so doing, become better at locating pertinent scholarship related to your topic;
Improve your general research and writing skills;
Practice identifying the logical steps that must be taken to accomplish one's research goals;
Critically review, examine, and consider the use of different methods for gathering and analyzing data related to the research problem; and,
Nurture a sense of inquisitiveness within yourself and to help see yourself as an active participant in the process of conducting scholarly research.

A proposal should contain all the key elements involved in designing a completed research study, with sufficient information that allows readers to assess the validity and usefulness of your proposed study. The only elements missing from a research proposal are the findings of the study and your analysis of those findings. Finally, an effective proposal is judged on the quality of your writing and, therefore, it is important that your proposal is coherent, clear, and compelling.

Regardless of the research problem you are investigating and the methodology you choose, all research proposals must address the following questions:

What do you plan to accomplish? Be clear and succinct in defining the research problem and what it is you are proposing to investigate.
Why do you want to do the research? In addition to detailing your research design, you also must conduct a thorough review of the literature and provide convincing evidence that it is a topic worthy of in-depth study. A successful research proposal must answer the "So What?" question.
How are you going to conduct the research? Be sure that what you propose is doable. If you're having difficulty formulating a research problem to propose investigating, go here for strategies in developing a problem to study.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Failure to be concise . A research proposal must be focused and not be "all over the map" or diverge into unrelated tangents without a clear sense of purpose.
Failure to cite landmark works in your literature review . Proposals should be grounded in foundational research that lays a foundation for understanding the development and scope of the the topic and its relevance.
Failure to delimit the contextual scope of your research [e.g., time, place, people, etc.]. As with any research paper, your proposed study must inform the reader how and in what ways the study will frame the problem.
Failure to develop a coherent and persuasive argument for the proposed research . This is critical. In many workplace settings, the research proposal is a formal document intended to argue for why a study should be funded.
Sloppy or imprecise writing, or poor grammar . Although a research proposal does not represent a completed research study, there is still an expectation that it is well-written and follows the style and rules of good academic writing.
Too much detail on minor issues, but not enough detail on major issues . Your proposal should focus on only a few key research questions in order to support the argument that the research needs to be conducted. Minor issues, even if valid, can be mentioned but they should not dominate the overall narrative.

Procter, Margaret. The Academic Proposal. The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Sanford, Keith. Information for Students: Writing a Research Proposal. Baylor University; Wong, Paul T. P. How to Write a Research Proposal. International Network on Personal Meaning. Trinity Western University; Writing Academic Proposals: Conferences, Articles, and Books. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Writing a Research Proposal. University Library. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Structure and Writing Style

Beginning the Proposal Process

As with writing most college-level academic papers, research proposals are generally organized the same way throughout most social science disciplines. The text of proposals generally vary in length between ten and thirty-five pages, followed by the list of references. However, before you begin, read the assignment carefully and, if anything seems unclear, ask your professor whether there are any specific requirements for organizing and writing the proposal.

A good place to begin is to ask yourself a series of questions:

What do I want to study?
Why is the topic important?
How is it significant within the subject areas covered in my class?
What problems will it help solve?
How does it build upon [and hopefully go beyond] research already conducted on the topic?
What exactly should I plan to do, and can I get it done in the time available?

In general, a compelling research proposal should document your knowledge of the topic and demonstrate your enthusiasm for conducting the study. Approach it with the intention of leaving your readers feeling like, "Wow, that's an exciting idea and I can’t wait to see how it turns out!"

Most proposals should include the following sections:

I. Introduction

In the real world of higher education, a research proposal is most often written by scholars seeking grant funding for a research project or it's the first step in getting approval to write a doctoral dissertation. Even if this is just a course assignment, treat your introduction as the initial pitch of an idea based on a thorough examination of the significance of a research problem. After reading the introduction, your readers should not only have an understanding of what you want to do, but they should also be able to gain a sense of your passion for the topic and to be excited about the study's possible outcomes. Note that most proposals do not include an abstract [summary] before the introduction.

Think about your introduction as a narrative written in two to four paragraphs that succinctly answers the following four questions :

What is the central research problem?
What is the topic of study related to that research problem?
What methods should be used to analyze the research problem?
Answer the "So What?" question by explaining why this is important research, what is its significance, and why should someone reading the proposal care about the outcomes of the proposed study?

II. Background and Significance

This is where you explain the scope and context of your proposal and describe in detail why it's important. It can be melded into your introduction or you can create a separate section to help with the organization and narrative flow of your proposal. Approach writing this section with the thought that you can’t assume your readers will know as much about the research problem as you do. Note that this section is not an essay going over everything you have learned about the topic; instead, you must choose what is most relevant in explaining the aims of your research.

To that end, while there are no prescribed rules for establishing the significance of your proposed study, you should attempt to address some or all of the following:

State the research problem and give a more detailed explanation about the purpose of the study than what you stated in the introduction. This is particularly important if the problem is complex or multifaceted .
Present the rationale of your proposed study and clearly indicate why it is worth doing; be sure to answer the "So What? question [i.e., why should anyone care?].
Describe the major issues or problems examined by your research. This can be in the form of questions to be addressed. Be sure to note how your proposed study builds on previous assumptions about the research problem.
Explain the methods you plan to use for conducting your research. Clearly identify the key sources you intend to use and explain how they will contribute to your analysis of the topic.
Describe the boundaries of your proposed research in order to provide a clear focus. Where appropriate, state not only what you plan to study, but what aspects of the research problem will be excluded from the study.
If necessary, provide definitions of key concepts, theories, or terms.

III. Literature Review

Connected to the background and significance of your study is a section of your proposal devoted to a more deliberate review and synthesis of prior studies related to the research problem under investigation . The purpose here is to place your project within the larger whole of what is currently being explored, while at the same time, demonstrating to your readers that your work is original and innovative. Think about what questions other researchers have asked, what methodological approaches they have used, and what is your understanding of their findings and, when stated, their recommendations. Also pay attention to any suggestions for further research.

Since a literature review is information dense, it is crucial that this section is intelligently structured to enable a reader to grasp the key arguments underpinning your proposed study in relation to the arguments put forth by other researchers. A good strategy is to break the literature into "conceptual categories" [themes] rather than systematically or chronologically describing groups of materials one at a time. Note that conceptual categories generally reveal themselves after you have read most of the pertinent literature on your topic so adding new categories is an on-going process of discovery as you review more studies. How do you know you've covered the key conceptual categories underlying the research literature? Generally, you can have confidence that all of the significant conceptual categories have been identified if you start to see repetition in the conclusions or recommendations that are being made.

NOTE: Do not shy away from challenging the conclusions made in prior research as a basis for supporting the need for your proposal. Assess what you believe is missing and state how previous research has failed to adequately examine the issue that your study addresses. Highlighting the problematic conclusions strengthens your proposal. For more information on writing literature reviews, GO HERE .

To help frame your proposal's review of prior research, consider the "five C’s" of writing a literature review:

Cite , so as to keep the primary focus on the literature pertinent to your research problem.
Compare the various arguments, theories, methodologies, and findings expressed in the literature: what do the authors agree on? Who applies similar approaches to analyzing the research problem?
Contrast the various arguments, themes, methodologies, approaches, and controversies expressed in the literature: describe what are the major areas of disagreement, controversy, or debate among scholars?
Critique the literature: Which arguments are more persuasive, and why? Which approaches, findings, and methodologies seem most reliable, valid, or appropriate, and why? Pay attention to the verbs you use to describe what an author says/does [e.g., asserts, demonstrates, argues, etc.].
Connect the literature to your own area of research and investigation: how does your own work draw upon, depart from, synthesize, or add a new perspective to what has been said in the literature?

IV. Research Design and Methods

This section must be well-written and logically organized because you are not actually doing the research, yet, your reader must have confidence that you have a plan worth pursuing . The reader will never have a study outcome from which to evaluate whether your methodological choices were the correct ones. Thus, the objective here is to convince the reader that your overall research design and proposed methods of analysis will correctly address the problem and that the methods will provide the means to effectively interpret the potential results. Your design and methods should be unmistakably tied to the specific aims of your study.

Describe the overall research design by building upon and drawing examples from your review of the literature. Consider not only methods that other researchers have used, but methods of data gathering that have not been used but perhaps could be. Be specific about the methodological approaches you plan to undertake to obtain information, the techniques you would use to analyze the data, and the tests of external validity to which you commit yourself [i.e., the trustworthiness by which you can generalize from your study to other people, places, events, and/or periods of time].

When describing the methods you will use, be sure to cover the following:

Specify the research process you will undertake and the way you will interpret the results obtained in relation to the research problem. Don't just describe what you intend to achieve from applying the methods you choose, but state how you will spend your time while applying these methods [e.g., coding text from interviews to find statements about the need to change school curriculum; running a regression to determine if there is a relationship between campaign advertising on social media sites and election outcomes in Europe ].
Keep in mind that the methodology is not just a list of tasks; it is a deliberate argument as to why techniques for gathering information add up to the best way to investigate the research problem. This is an important point because the mere listing of tasks to be performed does not demonstrate that, collectively, they effectively address the research problem. Be sure you clearly explain this.
Anticipate and acknowledge any potential barriers and pitfalls in carrying out your research design and explain how you plan to address them. No method applied to research in the social and behavioral sciences is perfect, so you need to describe where you believe challenges may exist in obtaining data or accessing information. It's always better to acknowledge this than to have it brought up by your professor!

V. Preliminary Suppositions and Implications

Just because you don't have to actually conduct the study and analyze the results, doesn't mean you can skip talking about the analytical process and potential implications . The purpose of this section is to argue how and in what ways you believe your research will refine, revise, or extend existing knowledge in the subject area under investigation. Depending on the aims and objectives of your study, describe how the anticipated results will impact future scholarly research, theory, practice, forms of interventions, or policy making. Note that such discussions may have either substantive [a potential new policy], theoretical [a potential new understanding], or methodological [a potential new way of analyzing] significance. When thinking about the potential implications of your study, ask the following questions:

What might the results mean in regards to challenging the theoretical framework and underlying assumptions that support the study?
What suggestions for subsequent research could arise from the potential outcomes of the study?
What will the results mean to practitioners in the natural settings of their workplace, organization, or community?
Will the results influence programs, methods, and/or forms of intervention?
How might the results contribute to the solution of social, economic, or other types of problems?
Will the results influence policy decisions?
In what way do individuals or groups benefit should your study be pursued?
What will be improved or changed as a result of the proposed research?
How will the results of the study be implemented and what innovations or transformative insights could emerge from the process of implementation?

NOTE: This section should not delve into idle speculation, opinion, or be formulated on the basis of unclear evidence . The purpose is to reflect upon gaps or understudied areas of the current literature and describe how your proposed research contributes to a new understanding of the research problem should the study be implemented as designed.

ANOTHER NOTE : This section is also where you describe any potential limitations to your proposed study. While it is impossible to highlight all potential limitations because the study has yet to be conducted, you still must tell the reader where and in what form impediments may arise and how you plan to address them.

VI. Conclusion

The conclusion reiterates the importance or significance of your proposal and provides a brief summary of the entire study . This section should be only one or two paragraphs long, emphasizing why the research problem is worth investigating, why your research study is unique, and how it should advance existing knowledge.

Someone reading this section should come away with an understanding of:

Why the study should be done;
The specific purpose of the study and the research questions it attempts to answer;
The decision for why the research design and methods used where chosen over other options;
The potential implications emerging from your proposed study of the research problem; and
A sense of how your study fits within the broader scholarship about the research problem.

VII. Citations

As with any scholarly research paper, you must cite the sources you used . In a standard research proposal, this section can take two forms, so consult with your professor about which one is preferred.

References -- a list of only the sources you actually used in creating your proposal.
Bibliography -- a list of everything you used in creating your proposal, along with additional citations to any key sources relevant to understanding the research problem.

In either case, this section should testify to the fact that you did enough preparatory work to ensure the project will complement and not just duplicate the efforts of other researchers. It demonstrates to the reader that you have a thorough understanding of prior research on the topic.

Most proposal formats have you start a new page and use the heading "References" or "Bibliography" centered at the top of the page. Cited works should always use a standard format that follows the writing style advised by the discipline of your course [e.g., education=APA; history=Chicago] or that is preferred by your professor. This section normally does not count towards the total page length of your research proposal.

Develop a Research Proposal: Writing the Proposal. Office of Library Information Services. Baltimore County Public Schools; Heath, M. Teresa Pereira and Caroline Tynan. “Crafting a Research Proposal.” The Marketing Review 10 (Summer 2010): 147-168; Jones, Mark. “Writing a Research Proposal.” In MasterClass in Geography Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning . Graham Butt, editor. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 113-127; Juni, Muhamad Hanafiah. “Writing a Research Proposal.” International Journal of Public Health and Clinical Sciences 1 (September/October 2014): 229-240; Krathwohl, David R. How to Prepare a Dissertation Proposal: Suggestions for Students in Education and the Social and Behavioral Sciences . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005; Procter, Margaret. The Academic Proposal. The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Punch, Keith and Wayne McGowan. "Developing and Writing a Research Proposal." In From Postgraduate to Social Scientist: A Guide to Key Skills . Nigel Gilbert, ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 59-81; Wong, Paul T. P. How to Write a Research Proposal. International Network on Personal Meaning. Trinity Western University; Writing Academic Proposals: Conferences , Articles, and Books. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Writing a Research Proposal. University Library. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Ideas for Developing Asia and the Pacific

Call for papers on climate-smart agriculture: adoption, impacts, and implications for sustainable development, share this page.

Asian Development Bank Institute

Climate change threatens to reduce agricultural productivity, disrupt global food supplies, and undermine food and nutritional security. Climate-smart agricultural practices can help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change and mitigate its impacts and advance sustainable development. Yet, while many smallholder farmers have adopted integrated crop systems, strengthened pest, water, and nutrient, reduced tillage, and enhanced input use efficiency consistent with climate-smart agriculture, increasing climate uncertainty is prompting more flexible and rapid responses in smallholder farming systems.

The Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) is seeking papers on climate-smart agriculture, with a focus on its adoption, impacts, and sustainable development implications in Asia and globally. The aim is to identify keys to boosting sustainable agricultural production and rural development to guide policy design and promote the farm sector’s climate resilience. Authors of selected papers will be invited to present their work during a virtual ADBI conference. Selected papers will also be considered for inclusion in a special issue of Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change , an SCI journal with a current impact factor of 3.926.

Paper topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Climate-Smart Agriculture Adoption

Drivers and barriers
Farmers’ awareness and willingness to pay
Socio-demographic characteristics and climate-smart agricultural practices
The role of development measures and entities (e.g., government programs, collective action, and farmer organizations) in promoting climate-smart agricultural practices

Climate-Smart Agriculture Impacts

Farm economic performance (e.g., crop yield, revenue, productivity, efficiency, production diversity, quality upgrading, and production risks)
Agri-food system transformation
Climate-smart agriculture cost-benefit analysis
Rural livelihoods (e.g., income, consumption, food security, nutrition intake, and dietary diversity)
Subjective well-being (e.g., happiness, life satisfaction, and loneliness)
Gender empowerment and intra-household decision-making (e.g., labor allocation and migration)
Gender-differentiated outcomes
Farmers’ climate change resilience

Submission Procedure

Authors should submit their full papers via this link by 31 August 2023. Please select “SI: Climate-smart Agriculture” when choosing the submission type.

Paper submissions must be original and neither currently published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. Papers must also comply with the submission guidelines for Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change .

All submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review and editorial processes in accordance with the policies of the journal.

Arrangements for Selected Papers

Authors of selected papers will be invited to present their work during the related ADBI virtual conference on 30-31 October 2023.

Final decisions about the publication of selected papers in the journal special issue will be made following the conference.

Guest Editors

Wanglin Ma, Lincoln University, New Zealand Dil Rahut , Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI)

Contacts

Inquiries may be directed to Lincoln University’s Wanglin Ma and ADBI’s Dil Rahut .

Submission Form

NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre Call for Interdisciplinary Research Proposals

Deadline friday 8 th november 2024, 17:00.

This initiative aims to provide researchers within NUTH , CNTW and Newcastle University with the opportunity to establish cross-discipline collaborations and to develop synergistic programmes of research that align with the BRC’s vision to transform lives through world-class research in ageing and multiple long-term conditions.

The BRC aims to drive excellence through themes with breadth and depth of world-class research in the following areas:

Ageing, Sarcopenia and Multimorbidity
Dementia, Mental Health and Neurodegeneration
Digital Health, Ageing Innovation and Inclusion
Informatics and Precision Care for an Ageing Population
Liver Disease, Multimorbidity and Lifestyle
Musculoskeletal Disease and Inflammation Medicine
Neuromuscular Disease, Rare Diseases and Mitochondrial Dysfunction
Skin Disease, Oral Disease and Immunogenomics

Through this call we aim to support a range of interdisciplinary activities including work in the five following priority areas:

Collecting standardised ageing and MLTC data across patient cohorts
Focusing on patient-priority symptoms including low mood and mobility
Incorporating advances in wearable technology across themes
Linking different rare disease research areas
Sharing mechanistic expertise such as single cell genomics

We encourage proposals from applicants who do not currently have links with the BRC but are keen to develop them. We welcome cross-faculty collaborations, proposals involving local NHS trusts and collaborations with industry partners.

Funding up to £10k per project is available
Projects should start in April 2025
Projects should be no more than 12 months’ duration

Further guidance can be found in the application form ( NIHR Newcastle BRC – Application Form (IDR Projects 2024) ). To apply, please submit the application form to [email protected] by 17:00 on Friday, 8 th November 2024.

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Dogchitecture: WE Architecture Designs a Center That Challenges Traditional Animal Shelters

Written by Ella Comberg

Copenhagen firm WE Architecture has completed a proposal for a “Dog Center” in Moscow that challenges traditional notions of animal shelters. Nestled in the countryside, the one-story pavilion will rely on a series of courtyards divided by pergolas that disappear into the landscape. The firm notes that the courtyards, which provide enclosed outdoor space for the dogs , allow the center “to avoid the 'jail-like' fencing which is often associated with dog shelters."

WE, in collaboration with MASU Planning , hopes to create a “healthy and inspiring environment for sheltered dogs and for the different people who will visit and work at the Center.” The project accomplishes its atmospheric goals by complimenting steel pillars with wooden rafters. The rafters extend to create an exterior overhang which functions as “a sun screen in summer time and as an exterior cover/hallway on rainy days.” As visitors approach the building, the green roof , which sits atop the wooden rafters, is meant to serve as a “fifth facade” that can blend in easily with its wooded surroundings. Extensive outdoor seating space bleeds into greenery, inviting both human and animal recreation.

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COMMENTS

PDF Three Models of Technology Adoption: A Literature Review in Brief
lished in 1989, 2003, and 2015.Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by Fred Davis (1989) is an early framework for describing technology adoption, with a specific focus o. the adoption of technologies in the information sciences domain. Davis' model focuses primarily on the concepts of perceived ease of use.
(PDF) Review: Adoption research: Trends, topics, outcomes
The current article provides a review of adoption research since its inception as a field of study. Three historical trends in adoption research are identified: the first focusing on risk in ...
Adoption research, practice, and societal trends: Ten years of ...
Abstract. Adoption involves the legal transfer of parental rights and responsibilities from a child's birth parents to adults who will raise the child (Reitz & Watson, 1992). Research related to adoption has expanded over the past 10 years and has incorporated more focus on implications for practice and public policy.
Mental health and behavioural difficulties in adopted children: A
This review seeks to summarise the post-adoption variables associated with adopted children's mental health or behavioural difficulties to inform future research and shape interventions. A search for publications that assess associated risk and protective factors using Web of Science, Psychinfo, Medline and Sociological Abstracts identified ...
Growing up in Open Adoption: Young Adults' Perspectives
Abstract. Most adoption agencies today allow a child's biological and adoptive families to know one another and maintain contact. This move toward openness instead of secrecy presents opportunities and challenges. The study reported here explores young adult adoptees' reactions to growing up in open adoptions.
Attachment across the Lifespan: Insights from Adoptive Families
Abstract. Research with adoptive families offers novel insights into longstanding questions about the significance of attachment across the lifespan. We illustrate this by reviewing adoption research addressing two of attachment theory's central ideas. First, studies of children who were adopted after experiencing severe adversity offer ...
Understanding Technology Adoption: Theory and Future Directions for
How and why individuals adopt innovations has motivated a great deal of research. This article examines individuals' computing adoption processes through the lenses of three adoption theories: Rogers's innovation diffusion theory, the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, the Technology Acceptance Model, and the United Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology.
Research proposal for Technology Adoption in the OER Ecosystem
This paper proposes as a research proposal to analyze and promote technological innovation of teachers based on the adoption of the open education model focused on Open Educational Resources. A study of the elements that make up this ecosystem is made and a methodology and a research driven by models of technological innovation is proposed ...
Center for Adoption Policy
168A Kirby Lane. Rye, New York 10580. Web site created and maintained by. Diva Productions. The Center for Adoption Policy (CAP) provides research, analysis, advice and education to practitioners and the public about current legislation and practices governing domestic and inter-country adoption in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America ...
Adoption Research
Adoption Research. We provide accurate, reliable, and up-to-date reports that inform and. equip professionals, policymakers, and the public at large to improve. and strengthen adoption. In 2021, we conducted the largest survey ever of adoptive parents. NCFA explored the profile of adoptive parents, their experiences, and what has changed in ...
Research proposal for technology adoption in the oer ecosystem
Research proposal for technology adoption in the oer ecosystem Abstract: In the scientific literature of the past 15 years it can be found numerous research initiatives and experiences related to the adoption of new technologies in education. Technological innovations have been constant, often accompanied by educational innovations, but the ...
Frontiers
A part of this sheet was designed to investigate the children pre-adoption histories, especially the motivations for which they were placed for adoption (e.g., parental abandonment, death, drug abuse, etc.) and the events leading to change of guardianship, such as neglect, physical and sexual abuse, institutionalization, and multiple placements.
Why technology adoption succeeds or fails: an exploration from the
This case is special for the ERP adoption research, for it is an exact "failure-followed-by-success" information technology adoption case, and it is adequate for doing an inner-case comparison. ... and thus it is instead based on specific research proposals and theories (Wang and Zhang 2012). This study defines a theoretical framework for ...
PDF Charging the Future: Challenges and Opportunities for Electric Vehicle
School's research and outreach on public policy that affects global environ-ment quality and natural resource management. Its mandate is to conduct policy-relevant research at the regional, national, international, and global level, and through its outreach initiatives to make its products available to
Review: Adoption research: Trends, topics, outcomes
The current article provides a review of adoption research since its inception as a field of study. Three historical trends in adoption research are identified: the first focusing on risk in adoption and identifying adoptee—nonadoptee differences in adjustment; the second examining the capacity of adopted children to recover from early adversity; and the third focusing on biological ...
Writing a Research Proposal
A research proposal must be focused and not be "all over the map" or diverge into unrelated tangents without a clear sense of purpose. Failure to cite landmark works in your literature review. Proposals should be grounded in foundational research that lays a foundation for understanding the development and scope of the the topic and its relevance.
AI in Human Resource: An Empirical Research on the Impact, Adoption
AI in Human Resource: An Empirical Research on the Impact, Adoption, and Employee Perspectives Abstract: It is the purpose of this academic study to experimentally investigate the use of AI in HR and its consequences operations across a range of organizations. The study employs a mixed-methods design, incorporating interviews and surveys, to ...
Conceptualization of Policy Adoption in Public Policy Areas
Policy adoption was defined by general conceptualization. The findings showed that policy adoption is a part of the decision to choose policy alternatives after the policy formulation process ...
Call for Papers on Climate-Smart Agriculture: Adoption, Impacts, and
The Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) is seeking papers on climate-smart agriculture, with a focus on its adoption, impacts, and sustainable development implications in Asia and globally. The aim is to identify keys to boosting sustainable agricultural production and rural development to guide policy design and promote the farm sector's ...
Adoption of climate‐smart agriculture among smallholder farmers: Does
Previous studies have explained the low adoption based on generic factors such as farm, farmer, institutional and location characteristics, yet little is known about the role of farmers ...
NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre Call for Interdisciplinary
Deadline Friday 8th November 2024, 17:00 This initiative aims to provide researchers within NUTH, CNTW and Newcastle University with the opportunity to establish cross-discipline collaborations and to develop synergistic programmes of research that align with the BRC's vision to transform lives through world-class research in ageing and multiple long-term conditions. The BRC aims to drive […]
Issues Involving International Adoption
Abstract. Challenges in adoptive families are well-documented; however, a lack of empirical research on the preadoption preparation of prospective adoptive parents for these common challenges exists. The purpose of this study was to seek a more thorough understanding of the education and preparation adoptive parents receive regarding potential ...
Dogchitecture: WE Architecture Designs a Center That Challenges
Copenhagen firm WE Architecture has completed a proposal for a "Dog Center" in Moscow that challenges traditional notions of animal shelters. Nestled in the countryside, the one-story pavilion ...
Moscow Russia Adoption and Adoptees
About this group. For adoptive families and adoptees of Moscow city and Moscow oblast, Russia. All baby homes, children's homes or orphanages in Moscow. Adoption group. Includes Fryazino, Vidnoye, Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Lobnya Krasnaya Polyana, Lubertsy, Ramenskoye, and more. Private. Only members can see who's in the group and what they post. Visible.
Russia's "Fourteen Points" for a European ...
The Russian proposal from 2009 is founded on existing norms of international security law according to the UN Charter, Declaration on Principles of International Law (1970), and the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (1975) followed by the Manila Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of International ...

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Adoption research, practice, and societal trends: Ten years of progress

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Attachment across the Lifespan: Insights from Adoptive Families

Mary Dozier

Long-term consequences of early attachment experiences

Adoption and attachment during early childhood

Adoption and attachment at later ages

Intergenerational transmission of attachment

Future directions

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Research proposal for Technology Adoption in the OER Ecosystem

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Adoption by the Numbers

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Introduction

Materials and Methods

Variables and Measures

Adolescents’ Cognitive Status

Adoptive Mothers

Socio-demographic and Adoption Data

Maternal psychopathology

Data Analysis

Descriptive Variables

Late Adopted Adolescents

Attachment IWMs in Adolescent-Mothers Dyads

Limitations and Future Developments

Conflict of Interest Statement

Why technology adoption succeeds or fails: an exploration from the perspective of intra-organizational legitimacy

Introduction

Literature review

Three forms of intra-organizational legitimacy for technology

The relationship and a comparison of the three dimensions

The process of ERP as applied in Da Company: from “dead” to “alive”

Changes in multiple forms of intra-organizational legitimacy of the technology, and the ups and downs in its adoption

Launch/implementation: the same task but different task legitimacy intensities

Stagnation: value legitimacy supported ERP through its crisis

Restart: task legitimacy was strengthened

In-depth application: the establishment of internal performance legitimacy

The effect of technology application and the covariance of technology legitimacy

Conclusion and discussion

Availability of data and materials

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Author information

Contributions

Corresponding author

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