EXPRESS: Continued Use Trajectories: How Entropy Work Sustains Technology Assemblages

Abstract

Why do some technology products enjoy enduring continued use while others are quickly discarded? Existing marketing research explains that continued use is motivated by cost-benefit decisions over how useful a tech-product is and how easy it is to use. Yet the interconnected nature of contemporary technologies means that continued use can depend on tech-products’ capacities to interact with other devices, objects, infrastructures, and people as parts of assemblages that generate useful properties. By theorizing interview and observational data of technology consumption through the lens of Assemblage Theory, the authors identify four continued use trajectories. These explain different paths from adoption to discontinued use by distinguishing component parts’ capacities to interact and hold assemblages together to sustain emergent properties. In each trajectory, continued use is sustained by entropy work to support a tech-product’s usefulness and ease-of-use. The implications of entropy work for theories of continued use and broader marketing scholarship are considered, and recommendations to help firms manage the opportunities and risks that accompany different continued use trajectories are offered.