Technology Legitimation and User Resistance: The NHS COVID-19 App.

Innovative technologies often face acceptance challenges. This is especially true when they constitute disruptive innovations. Disruptive innovations can forcefully alter the way things are done in the economy and society and have differential impacts for social groups. Legitimacy - the fit between an innovation, and society at large - is an important explanatory factor of the success of disruptive technologies. The micro-judgements of legitimacy that individuals make with regards to a technology, can help understand why some innovations succeed or fail. Likewise, users' actions when using said innovations may indicate how acceptable the technology is to users. This paper analyses how users judge, and use, the NHS COVID-19 Test & Trace app. Preliminary findings suggest that individuals' micro-legitimacy judgements are strongly related to the decision to use the app or not, and that users have adopted a number of workaround behaviours to resist or compensate for the app's functionality.