As the world globalizes and more multinationals operate in foreign locales, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how people react to information technology. In this paper, we use a combined social institutions and national culture approach to examine how these are related to one component of the technology acceptance model. Specifically, we hypothesize that three social institutions (degree of industrialization, degree of social inequality, and religiosity) and three national culture dimensions (uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and individualism) are related to the perceived usefulness of information technology. Because of the cross-level nature of our study, we use Hierarchical Linear Modeling to test our hypotheses on 26,999 individuals from 24 nations. Results support four of the six hypotheses (degree of industrialization, degree of social inequality, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity). Results reject hypotheses for religiosity and individualism. Implications of our findings for future research and practice are discussed.