Searching for European Alternatives: Digital Sovereignty, Digital Patriotism, and the Emerging Geopolitics of Software Adoption
For researchers and practitioners in software adoption and technology policy, this work extends theory by introducing value rationality alongside instrumental rationality, providing empirical evidence of geopolitics reshaping technology choice.
The paper identifies a new ideological dimension, 'digital patriotism,' driving software adoption decisions, showing through two studies that European government agencies and consumers increasingly prioritize sovereignty and geopolitical risk over traditional factors like cost and usability, even accepting functional trade-offs.
Software adoption has traditionally been understood through instrumental lenses, such as usability, cost, security, and interoperability. We argue that a new, ideological dimension is reshaping adoption decisions: one we term digital patriotism, the individual counterpart to the state ideology of digital sovereignty. Through two studies, we trace this phenomenon. First, a directed content analysis of decisions made by European government agencies to switch away from de facto technology standards reveals a shift around 2020: early switches cited costs and vendor lock-in, while later switches invoke sovereignty, geopolitical risk, and investment in local industry. Second, a qualitative analysis of over 700 online comments (over 51,000 words) surfaces how consumers and businesses articulate motivations for seeking European software alternatives. We find that digital patriotism entails a willingness to accept functional compromise in service of ideological goals. Our work extends software adoption theory by drawing attention to value rationality alongside instrumental rationality, and contributes an empirical account of how geopolitics is reshaping technology choice in the workplace.