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Organizational and institutional determinants of B2C adoption under shifting environments

  • Research Article
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Journal of Information Technology

Abstract

This study examines the adoption of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce by bricks-and-mortar companies comprising the Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P 500) listings between 1992 and 2003. B2C represents a Type III information systems (IS) innovation that integrates IS with core business technologies. Extant studies on Type III innovations have examined organizational and institutional factors, solely or collectively, in explaining adoption, but not how their effects change under shifting environments over time. We develop an integrated model comprising organizational factors (i.e., espoused values and resources) and institutional factors (i.e., normative and mimetic pressures), as well as the moderating influence of shifting environments (i.e., early period and late period demarcated by changes in the environment). Using a piecewise event-history model specification, we examine the adoption of B2C innovations by 93 organizations over time. Our results show that both organizational and institutional factors influence B2C adoption; however, their effects varied with the environmental shifts. Specifically, senior IS executives influenced adoption in the early period whereas bandwagon mimetic pressures and business norms influenced adoption in the late period. The findings of our research demonstrate the importance of explicitly modeling environmental shifts in theorizing organizational adoption of innovations.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Roy Schmidt and the two anonymous reviewers at Journal of Information Technology for their excellent suggestions. We are indebted to Rajiv Sabherwal and Mary Lacity for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper as well as John Sutton and Michael Allison for their assistance with statistical modeling. We appreciate the comments and suggestions provided by the participants of the College of Business Administration Seminar Series at the University of Missouri – St. Louis where an early version of this paper was presented as a research-in-progress work. Early research-in-progress versions of this paper were also presented (but not published) at the annual conference of the Academy of Management, Hawaii, 2005 and presented (and published in the proceedings) at the annual conference of the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), New York City, 2004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Raj Soin College of Business, Wright State University, 3640 Colonel Glenn Highway, Dayton, OH, USA

    Anand Jeyaraj

  2. College of Business Administration, University of Missouri– St. Louis, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO, USA

    Deborah B Balser

  3. University of North Carolina Greensboro, 424 Bryan Building, Greensboro, NC, USA

    Charles Chowa

  4. United States Military Academy, Building 600 Taylor Hall, West Point, NY, USA

    Gary M Griggs

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  1. Anand Jeyaraj
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  2. Deborah B Balser
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Correspondence to Anand Jeyaraj.

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Jeyaraj, A., Balser, D., Chowa, C. et al. Organizational and institutional determinants of B2C adoption under shifting environments. J Inf Technol 24, 219–230 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2008.22

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