Rajdeep Grewal

Shaping up for e-commerce: institutional enablers of the organizational assimilation of web technologies

The global reach of the Web technological platform, along with the range of services that it supports, makes it a powerful business resource. However, realization of operational and strategic benefits is contingent on effective assimilation of this type III IS innovation. This paper draws upon institutional theory and the conceptual lens of structuring and metastructuring actions to explain the importance of three factors-top management championship, strategic investment rationale, and extent of coordination-in achieving higher levels of Web assimilation within an organization. Survey data are utilized to test a nomological network of relationships among these factors and the extent of organizational assimilation of Web technologies.

Building Organizational Capabilities for Managing Economic Crisis: The Role of Market Orientation and Strategic Flexibility

Firms around the world often must manage and survive economic crises. Recent cases in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America bear testimony to this point. As economic weak spots are integrated into the global economy, it is timely to develop an understanding of organizational capabilities that can help firms manage their way through such crises. The authors investigate the role of market orientation and strategic flexibility in helping Thai firms manage the recent Asian crisis. The results demonstrate the contingent nature of the influence of market orientation and strategic flexibility on firm performance after a crisis has occurred. As hypothesized, market orientation has an adverse effect on firm performance after a crisis. This effect is moderated by demand and technological uncertainty and is enhanced by competitive intensity. In contrast, strategic flexibility has a positive influence on firm performance after a crisis, which is enhanced by competitive intensity and moderated by demand and technological uncertainty. It seems that market orientation and strategic flexibility complement each other in their efficacy to help firms manage varying environmental conditions.

The Role of the Institutional Environment in Marketing Channels

Set within the political economy framework, marketing channels literature predominantly has used an efficiency-based task environment perspective and largely overlooked a legitimacy-based institutional environment approach in studying channel attitudes, behaviors, processes, and structures. The purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of the institutional environment and develop a comprehensive conceptual framework that incorporates the institutional environment into current marketing channels research. The institutional environment perspective relies on the primacy of (1) regulatory institutions (e.g., laws), (2) normative institutions (e.g., professions), and (3) cognitive institutions (e.g., habitual actions) in influencing the legitimacy of channel members. Using institutional theory, the authors augment the current task environment approach by developing three institutional processes and their underlying mechanisms and elaborating on how these institutions might influence channel relationships. The article ends by laying out a research agenda and highlighting managerial implications.

Location, Location, Location: How Network Embeddedness Affects Project Success in Open Source Systems

The community-based model for software development in open source environments is becoming a viable alternative to traditional firm-based models. To better understand the workings of open source environments, we examine the effects of network embeddedness---or the nature of the relationship among projects and developers---on the success of open source projects. We find that considerable heterogeneity exists in the network embeddedness of open source projects and project managers. We use a visual representation of the affiliation network of projects and developers as well as a formal statistical analysis to demonstrate this heterogeneity and to investigate how these structures differ across projects and project managers. Our main results surround the effect of this differential network embeddedness on project success. We find that network embeddedness has strong and significant effects on both technical and commercial success, but that those effects are quite complex. We use latent class regression analysis to show that multiple regimes exist and that some of the effects of network embeddedness are positive under some regimes and negative under others. We use project age and number of page views to provide insights into the direction of the effect of network embeddedness on project success. Our findings show that different aspects of network embeddedness have powerful but subtle effects on project success and suggest that this is a rich environment for further study.

An Investigation into the Antecedents of Organizational Participation in Business-to-Business Electronic Markets

Business-to-business electronic markets have a profound influence on the manner in which organizational buyers and sellers interact. As a result, it is important to develop an understanding of the behaviors of firms that participate in these markets. The authors develop a typology for the nature of organizational participation to explain the behaviors of user firms in business-to-business electronic markets. The proposed model hypothesizes that the nature of participation depends on organizational motivation and ability. The authors conceptualize motivational factors in terms of efficiency and legitimacy motivations and theorize that ability results from the influence of organizational learning and information technology capabilities. They test the model using organizational-level survey data from jewelry traders that conduct business in an electronic market. The results indicate that both motivation and ability are important in determining the nature of participation; however, the level of influence of motivation and ability varies with the nature of participation.

The Role of Relational Knowledge Stores in Interfirm Partnering

Drawing on the notions of relational capabilities and absorptive capacity, the authors examine the effects of interactional, functional, and environmental knowledge stores on relationship quality and relationship portfolio effectiveness. The results suggest that the knowledge stores affect the outcome variables differently and that the effects vary by levels of industry turbulence.

Strategic Responses to New Technologies and Their Impact on Firm Performance

Modern corporations must adopt and assimilate new technologies to build and sustain competitive advantage. The authors develop a theoretical framework to understand the relationships among (1) strategic responses to new technologies, (2) organizational resources, and (3) firm performance. Specifically, they theorize that a strategic response can be categorized according to the dimensions of magnitude, domain, and speed, and they conceptualize organizational resources as tangible and intangible. The authors operationalize this framework for the adoption of the Internet by traditional store-based retailers, for which they posit strategic responses as the speed of (1) adopting the Internet as a communications channel, (2) adopting the Internet as a sales channel, and (3) forming e-alliances. In addition, they use resource slack to represent organizational resources. Results from nine years (1992–2000) of data on 106 firms establish the influence of strategic responses on firm performance (i.e., market valuation of the firm, operationalized as Tobins q). Specifically, the results show that both the adoption of the Internet as a communications channel and e-alliance formation positively influence firm performance. The positive effect of communications channel adoption on firm performance is enhanced further by the use of slack resources. Post hoc analysis reveals that the adoption of the Internet as a sales channel seems to matter only to firms that have preexisting catalog operations.

Incentive-Aligned Conjoint Analysis

Because most conjoint studies are conducted in hypothetical situations with no consumption consequences for the participants, the extent to which the studies are able to uncover “true” consumer preference structures is questionable. Experimental economics literature, with its emphasis on incentive alignment and hypothetical bias, suggests that more realistic incentive-aligned studies result in stronger out-of-sample predictive performance of actual purchase behaviors and provide better estimates of consumer preference structures than do hypothetical studies. To test this hypothesis, the authors design an experiment with conventional (hypothetical) conditions and parallel incentive-aligned counterparts. Using Chinese dinner specials as the context, the authors conduct a field experiment in a Chinese restaurant during dinnertime. The results provide strong evidence in favor of incentive-aligned choice conjoint analysis, in that incentive-aligned choice conjoint outperforms hypothetical choice conjoint in out-of-sample predictions. To determine the robustness of the results, the authors conduct a second study that uses snacks as the context and considers only the choice treatments. This study confirms the results by providing strong evidence in favor of incentive-aligned choice analysis in out-of-sample predictions. The results provide a strong motivation for conjoint practitioners to consider conducting studies in realistic settings using incentive structures that require participants to “live with” their decisions.

Early-Entrant Advantage, Word-of-Mouth Communication, Brand Similarity, and the Consumer Decision-Making Process

To better understand the competitive dynamics between an early and a later entrant, in this study we examined the extent to which word of mouth (WOM) regarding the later entrant and the later entrants similarity to the early entrant influences the consumer decision process. We hypothesized that the influence of WOM and similarity depends on the nature of the decision-making task, which is theorized as either a stimuli-based or memory-based task. A 3-stage, sequential-logit model with 2 focal brands (the early and later entrants) was developed to test the influence of independent measures on the likelihood of (a) retrieval; (b) consideration, given retrieval; and (c) choice, given consideration for both the early entrant and the focal follower. Data from 2 experiments provides support for the multistage conceptualization of the consumer decision process and demonstrates that the effects of WOM communication and similarity depend on the nature of the decision-making task.

The Timing of Repeat Purchases of Consumer Durable Goods: The Role of Functional Bases of Consumer Attitudes

In an attempt to bring consumer psychology theories into research on the timing of repurchase of consumer durables, the authors suggest that attitude functions (knowledge, value expressive, social adjustive, and utilitarian) can help explain and predict interpurchase intervals. Adopting an interactionist perspective, the authors propose that the effect of the attitude functions is contingent on contextual factors, which they theorize as the nature of the product (along public-private and luxury-necessity dimensions) and the nature of the decision (forced or unforced purchase decision). Hypothesis testing is facilitated by survey data on actual purchase decisions and hazard models that incorporate individual heterogeneity. The results support the suggested role of attitude functions in explaining and predicting interpurchase intervals and suggest means by which managers can position their products to shorten interpurchase intervals.