Challenging the paradigms on up-stream B2B e-commerce?

Based on a survey (n=392) of adoption of B2B e-commerce within the up-stream part of the Danish grocery sector value chain, this paper shows that technical-rational arguments and organizational readiness hold explanatory strength for adoption whereas the power and market perspective fails to explain adoption of e-commerce. Also, we found that factors that can explain e-commerce adoption fail to explain any pattern in the adoption data for the Web-EDI subset of e-commerce. Further on, the paper calls for a careful examination on how we design future studies. The paper suggests that rather than just replicating variables from previous generations of B2B e-commerce, focus should be directed towards a new set of variables for explaining the uptake of XML-based e-commerce.