Dauphine Recherches en Management

ABSTRACT This article calls attention to the role that mental proximity plays in driving organised proximity, alongside geographical proximity. We studied mental representations of urbanites and rural inhabitants during the city-dwellers flight during the COVID-19 crisis and found that press articles and readers’ comments were a relevant source for revealing mental proximity between rural inhabitants and newcomers. We analysed articles published during the first lockdown in France. Our results indicate that urban and rural dwellers have strongly opposed mental representations of people and spaces, on both the idyllic and infernal registers. However, verbatims also suggest potential pathways for working towards mental reconciliation.

As diversity in the marketplace increases through immigration, examples of intolerance, confrontation, and even violence by nationals toward immigrant small business owners have begun to appear in popular press worldwide. This study examines how a simple and potentially unintended service encounter failure can evolve into a verbal confrontation that is outside the realm of acceptable marketplace interaction, to recommend ways to protect immigrant shopkeepers and their pursuit of entrepreneurial success as business owners. The results of two experiments in South Africa and the United States highlight that intercultural service encounter failure may put the shopkeeper at risk, as consumers’ reactions depend on the perceived level of similarity and anger, as well as the context. The findings suggest ways for policy makers to address the issues beyond the obvious repressive tools (i.e., training for [immigrant] shopkeepers in the management of consumers’ anger and a public campaign promoting diversity in the small business community).

The objective of this research is to propose an alternative theoretical model that goes beyond the well-accepted separation between adoption and appropriation. The theoretical analysis of appropriation ignores the question of adoption of the technology. As mobile technologies can be used for private or business purposes, and because employees have often a prior experience with mobile technologies before joining a company, the linkage between adoption and appropriation of mobile technologies should be taken into account at the theoretical level. The uses developed at the individual level, outside the company environment and before entering the company, can influence organizational usage and the processes of appropriation at the organizational level. Our purpose in this article is to see if there us a link between mobile technology adoption and appropriation, and usage. We first present the numerous specific characteristics of mobile technologies that generate paradoxical effects for the user. We then examine the traditional models of adoption to show their limitations, specifically in the case of mobile technologies. The principal models of appropriation are then discussed. An exploratory empirical study, involving 76 managers in eight French companies is presented to understand the logic of adoption and the uses of mobile technologies. This research highlights the complex logic of adoption and usage that diverges from the existing models that are discussed in the theoretical section. In the final part of the paper, the discussion of the results makes it possible to outline a new theoretical framework that combines the adoption process and the appropriation process