How Cultural Influences Operate at the Management Level

This chapter describes how managerial preferences examined in Chapter 5 actually operate at the management level in a factory. As discussed in Chapter 3, in the questionnaire, a separate set of questions from the shop-floor level was prepared for data collection as compared to the management level. This was done because different effects of IT had been identified between the shop-floor and management levels from my previous empirical study (Kambayashi, 1996a), and it could be presumed that a different type of IT use would be observed between the two levels. The questions were set to ascertain the use of IT by a line manager in a factory. As with the last chapter, I discuss CIU and IIU in turn in the following sections. As I discussed in Chapter 3, CIU at the management level has been presumed to develop in six specific areas, and the relationship between CIU and the measures of actual practices of IT use at the management level is outlined in Table 7.1. The results of reliability tests are indicated below the table. As indicated in the table, managerial preferences for CIU are presumed to appear as these concrete phenomena at the level of management organisation in a factory. Similar to the discussion at the shop-floor level, the managerial preference for the concentration of important information at the top management level would operate as, for instance, limited access for line managers to strategic information