Information Privacy Assimilation in Organizations - A Neo Institutional Approach

Information privacy at the organizational level is receiving increased attention due to the huge amount of personal information being stored, transmitted across national boundaries, and ownership being shared between organizations due to change in business dynamics. There has been some recent developments in the field of data privacy with several countries enacting or strengthening data protection laws, influencing the organizational privacy policies. However, privacy assimilation is not simple as privacy has multiple aspects. There is a great need for investigating the forces that impact the privacy preserving practices within an organization. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a model based on neo-institutional theory to understand the influencing forces, mediating forces within an organization for information privacy assimilation - impelling the business strategies and activities at the organizational level. This model considers privacy as an independent entity and evaluates the synergy between privacy and security along with key differences.