No abstract

Across industries, firms have adopted e-business initiatives to better manage their internal business processes as well as their interfaces with the environment. In this study, a unified framework that captures the antecedents of e-business adoption, adoption intensity, and performance outcomes is proposed and empirically tested using data collected from senior managers in four technology-intensive industries. Applying a framework that captures the intensity of e-business adoption across four business process domains, the authors find that the antecedents and performance outcomes of e-business adoption are best studied in a process-specific context. They find, for example, that while the communication and internal administration aspects of e-business positively affect performance outcomes, the more high-profile activities related to online order taking and e-procurement do not. The authors' findings provide the foundation for a more rigorous study of e-business.

We introduce and empirically test a theoretical metamodel that explains knowledge-sharing behavior among employees. Building on the well-established motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA) framework, we posit that knowledge sharing among employees is a function of their MOA to do so. Existing literature suggests that the interaction among motivation, opportunity, and ability drives knowledge-sharing behavior. In contrast, we specify a new model in which the ''bottleneck'' or constraining factor among the MOA variables determines the degree of knowledge sharing that occurs. This constraining-factor model (CFM) fits the data better than the traditional multiplicative model and reveals a new, qualitatively different portrait of knowledge sharing that resolves some of the puzzles in the previous literature. The CFM provides macro-level insights with respect to how operations managers can improve employee knowledge sharing by focusing on the bottleneck MOA variable. As a result, the CFM can help set strategic directions of related policies. The model emphasizes that, counter to conventional wisdom, the MOA variables should not be addressed independently, but rather in a dynamic and coordinated way. #

Business pundits have enthusiastically prognosticated about a seamless, mobile world where commerce occurs on an anywhere, anytime basis. This type of commerce has been referred to as mobile commerce or, more simply, mcommerce. However, there have been relatively few attempts to systematically explore the opportunities and challenges posed by m-commerce. This article investigates the implications of m-commerce for markets and marketing by means of a formal conceptualization of m-commerce, a space-time matrix that delineates the impact of mobile technologies, and a taxonomy of m-commerce applications.