Developing Sustainable B2B E-Commerce Scenarios in the Chinese Context - A Research Proposal

This paper outlines the theoretical concept of a studycurrently under way in China. Its main idea is to explorethe sustainability of centralized inter-organizationalsystems for supply chain management as proposed byMarkus et al. ([8]). The study draws on institutionaltheory in both its older and its newer versions. Thistheory is used for selecting the method of data collectionas well as for deriving hypotheses and defining our notionof sustainability. To facilitate the development ofhypotheses, a simple theory-based scheme for classifyingindustrial institutional structures is developed which,however, needs further refinement. It is envisaged that thestudy will be extended in a second stage to replicatefindings in other countries in order to assess the influenceof government policy and of institutional structuresresiding on the level of a whole country.