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30 March 2008

Peter Erdélyi
PhD Candidate
Information Systems and Innovation Group
Department of Management
London School of Economics and Political Science

Supervisors: Edgar A Whitley and Nathalie Mitev

Organising Performance in E-Commerce Firms: A Multi-Case Study of Small Retailers in the


South of England

Keywords: Organisational knowledge, organisational learning, ICTs, e-commerce, small


firms, innovation, routines, entrepreneurship, actor-network theory

Abstract:

In the past decade policy makers in the United Kingdom as well as the European Union have
considered the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by small and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as a key driver for productivity growth and overall
economic competitiveness. The SME has been designated as an important site for fostering
innovation and entrepreneurship through the use of ICTs, including e-commerce
technologies. These political aspirations for building a “knowledge economy” coincided with
the increasing prominence of the competence perspective in economic strategy research,
which sees the source of a firm’s competitive advantage in organisational knowledge and
learning.

While political and organisational initiatives aimed at improving knowledge management and
organisational learning through the use of ICTs continue to proliferate, there is also an
emerging sense in the literature that the notion of competence is inadequate for explaining
the organising and strategising practices of firms. The opaqueness of the concept is blamed
for the difficulty in operationalising it for qualitative empirical research, which is in turn
considered to be scarce. The proposition that knowledge and ICTs are the main sources of
competitive advantage for SMEs (and the national economy as a whole) therefore continues
to demand attention, as the links between ICT artefacts, organisational competences,
innovation, entrepreneurship and competiveness are far from being transparent.

In order to approach this problem area, I draw on the literature of science and technology
30 March 2008

studies (STS), actor-network theory (ANT), economic sociology, and the strategy-as-practice
perspective for my conceptual apparatus. Such an approach allows me to rephrase the
classical question of strategic management and the economic theory of the firm. Instead of
asking “How are knowledge and ICT artefacts the source of an SME’s competitive
advantage?” I focus on the organising and strategising practices that constitute the small
firm. The firm itself is conceptualised as the performance of a heterogeneous assemblage,
an arrangement of a variety of actors and relationships. The rephrased question asks: “How
is performance organised (and organising performed) in small e-commerce retailers and
what is the role of ICTs in this performance?

For my empirical research I am conducting a number of simultaneous case studies of small


online retailers based in the South of England. I am using qualitative data collection
techniques, including interviews and participant observation, in order to develop a thick
description of the organising and strategising practices of these firms. More specifically, I
focus on events of organisational innovation defined as episodes of rearrangements within
the heterogeneous assemblages which the firms are part of and which they themselves are.
The small firms I study would be classified as micro-enterprises under the current European
Union classification of SMEs. However, the issue of scale itself becomes problematised in
this research, as the adoption of e-commerce technologies explodes the traditional
boundaries of the small firm.

Primarily this study aims to make a contribution to the strategic theory of the firm, by
providing further articulation of the notion of organising competence (the competence to
organise) and its relationship with information and communication technologies. As part of
this, a reappraisal of the notions of innovation and entrepreneurship is expected to emerge.
The findings are expected to be relevant for practitioners (managers of small enterprises)
and policy makers as well. A contribution to social science research methodology and our
understanding of the ontological, epistemological and political dimensions of worth creation
would be desirable.

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