Electronic Commerce: The End of the Beginning

Studies of the diffusion of innovation have covered a wide range of industry sectors and information system types over recent years. As Electronic Commerce grows in importance, however, it becomes increasingly urgent to understand how the innovations of technology and business processes which E-Commerce involves can be explained and understood in terms of their potential for innovation and for major changes in ways of doing business. Adoption of Electronic Commerce thus fixes attention on the significance of organisational issues in the successful takeup of innovative technologies. By applying theoretical perspectives from other disciplines and methodologies, as researchers, we were able to widen the scope of our enquiry and pool the lessons we derived from these wider perspectives. Following from this broader theoretical perspective, we present a rationale for reviewing themes in the literature of diffusion and organisational literature. Our review showed that the linear, or stage, model was still current in much of the literature and that factor research maintained its popularity as a methodology in the reference disciplines for Electronic Commerce. However we critique those approaches which present innovation as an entity with prescribed stages and question their applicability to an open-ended customisable and unprecedented innovation such as Electronic Commerce. Finally, we suggest that organisational literature applied to Electronic Commerce implementation studies can contribute to a better understanding of complex innovation ‘episodes’ as they emerge and unfold over time.