Longitudinal Model of E-Commerce: Environmental,

¶ … Longitudinal Model of e-Commerce: Environmental, Technological, and Organizational Drivers of B2C Adoption (Rodriguez-Ardura, Meseguer-Artola, 2010) the authors have defined and implemented a longitudinally-based methodology for tracking e-commerce adoption in early-adopter companies in Spain. The sampling is comprised of Spanish businesses, stratified by income levels and business sectors. The authors are also have defined and quantified environmental factors from the context of compliance and regulations, technological factors that include many attributes, from Internet access to the relative level of sophistication of the small or medium business (SMB) with technology. These last sets of factors are organizationally based and concentrate on the leadership approaches and styles, organizational structure and span of control. What is particularly challenging about this study is its focus on the long-term.

Critique of Toward a Longitudinal Model of e-Commerce: Environmental, Technological, and Organizational Drivers of B2C Adoption

This is an ambitious study on several levels. Frist, the contention that the Spanish small and medium businesses (SMBs) are representative enough of global businesses to have the results extrapolated opens up many questions. How can the researchers make sure a generalization about the comparability of sampling frames? This first assumption of the similarity of small and medium business growth, and its adoption of technology is not supported through empirical analysis. Second, the technological factors discovered in the analysis are obvious. Certainly, Internet access and support for technologies in companies is going to completely change their adoption rate of e-commerce. The authors use longitudinally-based techniques and analysis to make this point yet it seems obvious from the initial data sets. The apparent lessons learned from frequency distribution analysis and an assessment of the data do not get past the methodology to gain greater insights however. The researchers could have made a much more valuable study possible by using the methodology as the foundation instead of the fences or barriers to further accomplishment of analysis.