Chu, Catherine

catherine.chu@hotmail.co.uk

The Challenges in Assimilating E-business in Large Established Organisations: a structurational examination of the e-business development at an American auto manufacturer

(2004)

Despite the bust of dot.coms, e-business still holds tremendous opportunity. The focus of large-scale e-business development has shifted to the large 'blue-chip' corporations, as profitability from this technology is mainly found where the online business is an extension of traditional strategies and capabilities.

However, unlike the nimble dot.com competitors, large companies not only have to tackle a new technology that could permeate throughout the entire organisation, and beyond to their customers and suppliers, but in many cases they have to deal with new business models, radically revised processes, a new channel for marketing and sales, new cost pressures, and a heightened service expectation from consumers. This is particularly difficult for large companies that span the globe with their rigid bureaucratic structures, complicated power structures, and ingrained cultural properties. Large corporations have to implement significant and complex organisational changes in order to integrate e-business into their existing structural, power, and cultural properties.

Hence, the aim of this research is to address the challenges in assimilating e-business in large established organisations, and how major new technologies with significant business potential change/ reproduce their existing systems and structures.

In order to capture a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of how organisations undergo change, this research applies Giddens' (1984) structuration theory, as this meta-theory explores the instantiation of systems and gives equal emphasis to agents and structure.

Aligning to this theoretical perspective, and given little literature on organisational change associated with the assimilation of e-business, an interpretive qualitative paradigm is applied. As a methodology, a case study represents the pre-eminent means of understanding the 'how' and 'why' of a phenomenon. The in-depth case study considered examines the establishment, operation and termination of a special purpose e-business staff unit at the European corporate headquarters of an American auto manufacturer (from June 2000 to December 2002).

This thesis demonstrates the potential of human agency to change institutional properties, but also the strength of these institutional properties in the face of change. It highlights the reasons for the difficulty in making an effective change, in this case, to create and integrate a local practice of e-business. It also draws attention to why this particular intervention of building e-business organisational capabilities was unsustainable. Finally, on a more prescriptive/ strategic level, it suggests ways in which top executives can design and improvise interventions and provides lessons for established organisations in implementing a new technology that could have very pervasive effects throughout the entire organisation.

Supervisor: Steve Smithson, PhD

Catherine Chu is currently a Executive Director (Strategy and Support Services) at the Hsin Chong Construction Co., Hong Kong
 

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