Theoretical Impediments to Understanding B2B Electronic Commerce

This paper proposes that the lack of a theoretical framework able to address policy issues on the firm as well as the industry level in an integrated manner contributes to a failure of developing effective e-commerce policies. Specifically, theoretical approaches fall into the two broad categories of market and organization theory with a gaping chasm in between. We elaborate on our proposition by outlining three areas of e-commerce policy formulation plagued by this conceptual problem and illustrate our argument by three case examples. We then discuss the potential of four selected theories to overcome the conceptual chasm between organization and market theories, namely industrial organization theory, evolutionary approaches, coordination theory, and industry life cycle theories.