E-commerce Foundations: Disciplines and Societal Challenges

Societal Issues in Global E-commerce

Understanding the pressures that global e-commerce places on contemporary society is critical to being successful in the e-commerce marketplace. The primary societal issues are intellectual property, individual privacy, and public policy.

Academic Disciplines Contributing to E-commerce

The study of e-commerce requires identifying and integrating knowledge from major academic disciplines. There are two primary approaches to e-commerce research: technical and behavioral. Each of these approaches is represented by several academic fields.

Technical Approaches to E-commerce

On the technical side, key contributing disciplines include:

• Computer Scientists: Interested in e-commerce as an application of Internet technology.
• Management Scientists: Primarily interested in building mathematical models of business processes and optimizing them to learn how businesses can exploit the Internet to improve their business operations.
• Information Systems Professionals: Interested in e-commerce because of its implications for firm and industry value chains, industry structure, and corporate strategy.
• Economists: Have focused on online consumer behavior and on the features of digital electronic markets.

Behavioral Approaches to E-commerce

On the behavioral side, contributing disciplines include:

• Sociologists: Have focused on studies of Internet usage, the role of social inequality in skewing Internet benefits, and the use of the Web as a personal and group communications tool.
• Finance and Accounting Scholars: Have focused on e-commerce firm valuation and accounting practices.
• Management Scholars: Have focused on entrepreneurial behavior and the challenges faced by young firms that are required to develop organizational structures in short time spans.
• Marketing Scholars: Have focused on consumer response to online marketing and advertising campaigns, and the ability of firms to brand, segment markets, target audiences, and position products to achieve higher returns on investment.