In this study, we examine the influence of a firm's environmental factors on its intention to adopt software as a service (SaaS). We operationalized our assessment of a firm's environmental pressures as mimetic, coercive and normative pressures and examined the moderating role of perceived technology complexity. Mimetic forces are pressures to copy or emulate other organizations’ activities, systems or structures. Coercive pressures are formal or informal pressures exerted on organizations by other organizations upon which they are dependent. Normative forces describe the effect of professional standards and the influence of professional communities on an organization. We empirically tested our research model using data from 289 valid survey responses. The results provide support for the assertion that there are both significant direct and interaction effects that influence a firm's SaaS adoption intention. Most important was the significant interaction effects between mimetic pressure and perceived technology complexity. This suggests that the complex relationships proposed by institutional theory and diffusion of innovation help to describe how environmental pressures and perceived technology complexity combine to affect intention to adopt an emerging technology. The theoretical contributions of this study are (i) we integrated, tested and validated mature theories in today's supply chain era with a new but rapidly diffusing technology, (ii) and we answered the call to include practical technology artifacts in information systems studies. From a practical perspective, through this work managers may develop a better understanding regarding environmental factors and whether or not they should consider these issues for their firm when formulating an intention to adopt SaaS.

From July 1995 until July 1996 we followed a group of small companies that were retailing on the Web. We surveyed our sample three times over this period, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data and visible data from their Web sites. Our intention was to initiate research into successful Web‐based retail ‐ put simply, what makes a small company successful on the Web? Using ideas from grounded theory and our findings, we suggest important factors and constructs that can be used for further work in this area.

The main purpose of this study is to explore and map the intellectual structure of business ethics studies during 1997-2006 by analyzing 85,000 cited references of 3,059 articles from three business ethics related journals in SSCI and SCI databases. In this article, co-citation analysis and social network analysis techniques are used to research intellectual structure of the business ethics literature. We are able to identify the important publications and the influential scholars as well as the correlations among these publications by analyzing citation and co-citation. Three factors emerged in this study are: (1) ethical/unethical decision making, (2) corporate governance and firm performance, and (3) ethical principles and code of conduct.

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This study develops and validates an instrument for assessing organization improvisational capability (OIC) for potential use in future empirical studies. A definition of OIC and its dimensions are proposed based on an intensive literature review. An initial three-dimension, nine-item OIC scale derived from the literature is validated iteratively and then refined through a rigorous process into a two-factor, eight-item scale. The final scale demonstrates adequate psychometric properties, including reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. As such, this study contributes to a deeper theoretical understanding of the OIC construct and the appropriate application of such scales in future empirical studies. Future research on organization performance, agility, and strategy could utilize the proposed scale to study how OIC creates business value.