A theory of industry-level activity for understanding the adoption of interorganizational systems
- PDF / 204,775 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 598 x 796 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 165 Views
2000 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/00 $15.00 www.stockton-press.co.uk/ejis
A theory of industry-level activity for understanding the adoption of interorganizational systems RB Johnston1 and S Gregor2 1
Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia; 2Department of Computing and Information Systems, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, QLD 4701, Australia Increasingly we wish to ask and research questions about the adoption of interorganizational systems and electronic commerce at the industry level but are hampered by the lack of a theory of concerted purposeful action at this large level of analysis. In this paper we give the outlines of such a theory and indicate the uses to which it can be put. Particular attention is paid to how the routine day-to-day activities of the firms and support organizations that make up an industry group can be coordinated in such a way that we can speak of an industry as engaged in purposeful activity. We contend that only through a deep understanding of the possibilities and nature of routine coordinated activity at this level can issues concerning promotion, implementation and adoption of interorganizational systems by whole industries be properly framed. European Journal of Information Systems (2000) 9, 243–251.
Introduction At this stage of maturity of interorganizational systems (IOS) and electronic commerce (EC) research, one would like to ask questions such as: Why have certain industries been able to adopt electronic commerce technologies to reform supply chain management while others have not? What conditions within an industry particularly favour adoption of EC? What are the points of leverage that can be exploited to help an industry in the introduction of EC? Yet when we try to turn such questions into research agendas we are hampered by the lack of theory that can account for action at this broad level of analysis. Interorganizational systems research has dealt with the issues that arise when systems cross corporate boundaries, the difficulties of partnerships, and so forth, but has tended to focus on a limited scope of interorganizational interactions, often pair-wise. But what the above questions demand is a theory of the concerted activity of a large group of firms and support organizations, which includes firms in the direct value chains, infrastructure providers, regulators, and trade organizations, who have a business interaction focussed on a particular product. Discussing purposeful activity at the industry level presents some new theoretical challenges. Although the practice has been criticised (Silverman, 1970), in the case of organizational activity it is to some extent possible to associate organizational intentions with those of a powerful individual such as the CEO and to assert that such a person’s view of activity can act as a shared view for the organization. Given the discrete corporate identities of the players at the industry level, it is much more
difficult to as
Data Loading...
