Research in Economics and Commerce – Fertility from Fusion?

Economics and Commerce are closely related. Many aspects fall in both areas or in their borderline. Modern research, particularly in social and managerial sciences needs to have trans-disciplinary approach with both common-purpose and special-purpose applications. That gives a vast canvas for researchers in commerce and economics. From consultative research to collaborative research – the transition aids knowledge enhancement, skill up gradation, and policy formulation and fine-tuning. Time has come for research acumen to be integrated with business agility. New concepts, constructs and practices such as ubiquitous commerce (u-commerce): combination of traditional e-commerce and wireless, television, voice and silent commerce; enterprise resource planning; social entrepreneurship; and social market economy have emerged. Fusion or integrated research is the new paradigm. The present paper deals with various aspects of the new paradigm in order to help us face the challenges involved in emerging areas of research in economics and commerce, including prioritising and programming. The paper unravels similarities and basic differences between the closely related disciplines of economics and commerce, and between quantitative and qualitative research content and methodologies. It gives insights into integrative business research that fuses economics and commerce, and their quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, especially given new advances in globalization, information technology, networking, Internet and WWW, and social e-media technologies