Organizational effects on e-business in companies

Abstract

The end of the 1990s witnessed a firm establishment of IT, Internet and various forms of e-commerce in business-to-business trade. The new technology is commonly presented as a new, revolutionary way of doing business. In our study we examine this image in practice, describing how a fashionable idea, in this case Internet-based e-commerce, meets local practices at Swedish Technology Corporation (S-Tech). The circulation of the idea is in the hands of many people who can act in many different ways. As a consequence, the idea is continuously changed, often undergoing creative transformations. The specific event under study is the implementation of the e-commerce system called 7Summits at S-Tech’s purchase division. The new system is expected to produce drastic changes in the purchasing process as such. As the implementation goes on, several changes of the original plan of the process and of the study itself take place. The implementation of 7Summits is going to take more time than originally planned, and we will continue to follow this process. It has also become clear that the study needs to be expanded beyond S-Tech - to suppliers and contractors, but also to other companies belonging to the holding company A-Tech, since S-Tech cooperates with these in the development of 7Summits. The first insights confirmed also the necessity of applying a gender perspective to study how work tasks, positions and professions in this rather masculine context are changed (or not) by the implementation of e-commerce.