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Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

Recent interest in social entrepreneurship among young people has led to a heightened interest in new research. Few studies, however, have yet to investigate motivators of involvement, particularly from countries that are new to social entrepreneurship. The current study set out to better understand this phenomenon among young social entrepreneurs in Malaysia. In-depth one-to-one interviews with 12 young entrepreneurs were carried out to collect the data. Four themes and ten sub-themes emerged from the interviews, including early life experience (childhood experience and family experience), inspiration from clients and colleagues (interactions with the target group and exposure to social entrepreneurs), work-related experience (volunteer experience and job-related experience), and personal meaning (contribute back to society, desire for more meaning in life, and personal passions). The implications for policy-makers and interested parties are outlined in regard to enhancing participation and interest among youth for social entrepreneurship.

The chapter aims to investigate the role and the impact of social media in influencing and shaping (new) tourism experiences.

A service dominant logic and co-creation approach and concepts was adopted for examining how the social media can influence interactions and participation that represent two major sources of tourism experiences.

The chapter provides several arguments showing how social media-enabled interactions and participation can facilitate, foster, and expand the experience co-creation process by altering: when, how, why, what, by whom, and how tourism experiences are co-created.

The chapter develops and argues a theoretical framework that needs to be further validated, refined, and expanded in various contexts.

The chapter provides several examples showing the practical implications on how tourists and tourism firms use the social media for enriching their interactions and participation in the co-creation of tourism experiences.

The chapter also illustrates how the social interactions supported and fostered by the social media can be used for influencing, shaping and promoting specific tourism experiences (i.e., sustainable tourism behavior, socially responsible tourism development).

Past research on technology enhanced tourism experiences has adopted a phenomenological approach to explaining experience creation. The chapter expands this literature by advocating the individualized and the socially co-constructed nature of tourism experiences as well as by adopting an intersubjective approach for explaining how the social media enable an iterative process among the tourists’ and their social context that in turn is responsible for the continuous formation of tourism experiences.

Rooted in adult fear, adult authority aims to protect and control youth (Gannon, 2008; Valentine, 1997). Continuously negotiating for freedom, youth search for adult-free public spaces and are therefore extremely attracted to social networking sites (boyd, 2007, 2014). However, a significant portion of youth now includes adult authorities within their Facebook networks (Madden et al., 2013). Thus, this study explores how youth navigate familial- and educational-adult authorities across social networking sites in relation to their local peer culture.

Through semi-structured interviews, including youth-centered and participant-driven social media tours, 82 youth from the Northeast region of the United States of America (9–17 years of age; 43 females and 39 males) shared their lived experiences and perspectives about social media during the summer of 2013.

In their everyday lives, youth are subjected to the normative expectations emerging from peer culture, school, and family life. Within these different and at times conflicting normative schemas, youth’s social media use is subject to adult authority. In response, youth develop intricate ways to navigate adult authority across social networking sites.

Adult fear is powerful, but fragile to youth’s interpretation; networked publics are now regulated and youth’s ability to navigate then is based on their social location; and youth’s social media use must be contextualized to be holistically understood.

Pain is demonstrated as a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon that is interdependent and connected between people. The author proposes that social scientists use a “total model” of pain to better understand pain epistemologically and ontologically and people’s “pain lives.” Through this model, and drawing from the author’s own research on mixed martial artists, new ways to conceptualize, study, and talk about pain within the sporting context have been outlined.

In the first part of this chapter, pain is discussed with respect to how it has been researched and understood within the fields of medicine, sport psychology, and the sociology of sport. In the second part of this chapter, the total pain model developed by Dame Cicely Saunders is explored as a revolutionary development for the ways in which pain is understood and treated within the health field. Lastly, the author proposes a reconstructed methodology for the study of pain.

Pain should be studied not from one tradition, but using an amalgamation of the medical, sport psychology, and sociology of sport traditions and perspectives. In this way, the many dimensions of the phenomenon, social, cultural, political, material/physical, spiritual, existential, emotional, and cognitive must be explored from all systems and languages of pain in order to achieve a more robust understanding of pain in sport.

The dualistic relationship between theory and method currently present in most qualitative research does not fully account for the complexity of bodies in pain. Therefore, it is critical to adopt an interwoven methodological and theoretical approach that enables scholars to relate to, and feel with, people in pain.

This chapter presents insights about prospective students’ information experience when using social media to support their decision-making concerning which university to attend. When choosing a university, prospective students experience different ways of using information, engaging with a variety of sources, which have changed rapidly from traditional print and mass media, exhibitions and road shows, to the Internet and university websites. Increasingly, prospective students use information via diverse social media platforms where they can engage, participate and collaborate as information users on the social web. As a result, their information experience is expanding beyond information seeking to engagement with social media and participation in a dynamic online community.

Drawing on a literature review and my own research, I demonstrate that prospective students’ information experience involves collaboration, engagement and communities via social media. I present findings that contrast prospective students’ dynamic and wider multidimensional information experience of the social web, with static and unidimensional information seeking of traditional sources. In particular, I demonstrate that prospective students can now ‘experience’ the university and seek peer advice by collaborating in online communities. In this way, they gain tangible as well as intangible university information.

The definition of the term “family” around the Western world is more heterogeneous than ever before and so are its roles and the social expectations of it. However, prisoners’ families (specifically parents and siblings) are expected to support their incarcerated son/brother as they are perceived responsible for his choices and as having the closest relationship with him. Based on a study of parents and siblings of incarcerated men in Israel, this chapter’s goal is to shed light on families’ choice to support their incarcerated son or brother and the struggles this choice entails. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 17 parents and 10 siblings of incarcerated men in Israel showed that nuclear family members may experience various struggles throughout the legal proceedings, including family hardships, negative social experiences, and negative experiences with formal institutions – all leading to social self-exclusion. Looking through the intersectionality lens, the findings show that when accumulating hardships that prisoners’ families experience encounter perceived harsh institutional systems of oppression, preordained marginalization can be deepened as families operate in opposition.