Disentangling the Effects of Legal Intervention on Unethical IT Use in the Post-Adoption Phase

Given the serious concern of the rising levels of Unethical Information Technology Use (UITU), this research aims at exploring the extent to which legal intervention can deal with UITU. To explore the topic, we borrowed the lenses of the Rational Choice Theory (RCT) from the criminology discipline since this provides a useful framework to analyze deviant behaviors such as UITU. Taking into account the exploratory aspect of our research, we adopted a qualitative case study design rooted in an interpretive stance. We studied the effect of the legal intervention on the use of the technology of Online Reverse Auctions (ORAs) notably by interviewing multiple informants such as IT users, IT initiators, legal experts and institutional actors. Our contribution is threefold. Firstly, we show how the legal intervention was able to deal with the dark side of IT use by shuffling the equation of the perceived cost/benefit calculus by potential offenders in cases of UITU. Secondly, we show the extent to which UITU visibility can act as a deterrent mechanism that serves to prevent the dark side of IT use. Thirdly, our research has pointed out that the interplay between users’ adaptation and intervention does not necessarily lead to the desired outcome but can have instead, unexpected results such as a new UITU or IT reduction.