Mobile Electronic Commerce

21

chapter two

Dominant issues and conceptual

approaches in mobile business

research from 2005 to 2013

Joseph Budu and Richard Boateng

2.1 Introduction: Backgrounds and rationale

The ever-increasing rate of adoption and use of mobiles and related services

has numerous effects on individuals and businesses. These effects have

fairly spurred a number of valuable studies seeking to study and understand

the phenomenon and its interrelationships with business (e.g.,Schierholz

et al., 2007; Lee and Park, 2008; Frempong, 2009; Gonçalves and Ballon,

2011; Ghezzi, 2012, Jaramillo and Harting, 2013). This chapter undertakes a

review and classication of mobile business (m-business) research to indi-

cate the current state and direction of research issues in the eld. Reviews

are needed to facilitate the advancement of knowledge, theory develop-

ment, close saturated research areas, and uncover new areas for research

(Webster and Watson, 2002). Generally, mobile research is endowed with

Contents

2.1 Introduction: Backgrounds and rationale ........................................... 21

2.2 Framing mobile business research ....................................................... 22

2.3 Methodology for the review .................................................................. 24

2.4 Mobile business research: Issues and evidence ................................. 24

2.4.1 Mobile business applications/services .................................... 25

2.4.2 Economics, strategy, and business models ............................. 26

2.4.3 Consumer acceptance/adoption ............................................... 27

2.5 Mobile business research: Conceptual approaches ........................... 28

2.6 Discussions .............................................................................................. 31

2.6.1 Discussion of issues and evidence ........................................... 31

2.6.2 Discussion of conceptual approaches ...................................... 33

2.7 Conclusion and future research directions......................................... 35

References ..........................................................................................................36

22 Mobile Electronic Commerce

several such reviews (e.g., Fouskas et al., 2005; Scornavacca et al., 2006;

Ngai and Gunasekaran, 2007; Ladd etal., 2010). Scornavacca etal. (2006)

categorized and analyzed 235 journal and conference articles between 2000

and 2004 to suggest future research areas (1) about business and organi-

zational applications, (2) about empirical research, and (3) toward theory

development. Similarly, Fouskas etal. (2005) derived a research roadmap

after an in-depth review of m-business dimensions. The roadmap proposes

short-, medium-, and long-term research directions including but not lim-

ited to the study of organizational capacity to integrate mobile applications

(m- applications) and mobile services (m-services) within work culture and

business processes, content pricing, and interoperability. In addition, a more

recent review seems to have narrowed down on a specic m-application

area, that is, mobile commerce (m-commerce) research and applications

(Ngai and Gunasekaran, 2007). In addition, there exists an overarching

review of over 800 articles that states that within the broader mobile com-

puting research area “the technology itself was initially of interest, followed

by business applications, user concerns, and nally research related to com-

merce applications of the technology” (Ladd etal., 2010).

Ladd etal.’s review somewhat suggests that despite these existing

valuable reviews, none of them seems to satisfy the need to understand

the theoretical and conceptual approaches to m-business research.

Furthermore, considering the very dynamic nature of the m-business

area, there is room to contribute with a review of the current state of the

area. The purpose of this chapter is thus to understand the dominant

issues and conceptual approaches to m-business research from 2005 to

2013 to identify gaps and to suggest future research areas. This chap-

ter is structured into seven sections. Section 2.1 provides a background

to, and the purpose of, this chapter; Section 2.2 discusses m-business

denitions toward proposing a more comprehensive conceptualization;

and Section 2.3 describes the methodology of the review. Section 2.4

presents the results of the review, based on m-business research themes.

A discussion on the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of the previ-

ous research is presented in Section 2.5. Section 2.6 concludes with the

gaps in the issues and conceptual approaches to provide some future

research directions.

2.2 Framing mobile business research

Balasubramanian etal. (2002) observe that the term “m-business” lacks a

formal conceptualization. This void has led to seemingly ad hoc deni-

tions of the term in literature. For instance, Fouskas etal. (2005) dened it

as “…communication, information exchange and transactions conducted

over mobile or wireless networks,” while Giaglis (2006) dened it as

“…the ways in which mobile communication technologies can be applied