In this paper, we raise the issue of the appropriate unit of analysis for e-commerce studies.Once it is acknowledged that the unit of analysis in e-commerce studies should comprisemore than one firm, the question is, which organizations should be included, i.e. how tobound the unit? We discuss the e-commerce literature with regard to the implicit or explicitunit of analysis adopted there and then extend the literature review to include other conceptsfrom industrial organization and economic sociology. In total, fourteen concepts arediscussed and none is found to be sufficiently broad while at the same time also beingamenable to bounding. We introduce a new approach based on the notion of the industry lifecycle. The main proposition of our concept is that the unit of analysis should be defineddifferently for each life cycle stage. We also indicate how this could be done theoretically andempirically. There are, however, several open issues of this approach which need to beaddressed by future research.
