Explaining social media acceptance by business-to-business SMEs in the South-East of England: a theory-enhanced qualitative comparative analysis

Drawing on a model of technology acceptance for microbusinesses, this paper deploys a set-theoretic approach to unravel the causal complexity associated with acceptance and non-acceptance of social media by Business-to-Business Small-and-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) based in the South East of England. Our findings show the causal asymmetry between acceptance and non-acceptance. While customer attraction, raising the company’s profile and learning to use social media effortlessly lead to the acceptance of social media, non-acceptance requires finding social media not easy to use in combination with a lack of improvement of customer relations and work not becoming easier to do. Implications are discussed by highlighting the commonalities across positive and negative configurations of acceptance.