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This paper aims to provide details of a study on the widely shared definition of e‐government and to help scholars – especially young scholars – to understand the scope and meaning of the field.

From 1998‐2007, a ten‐year time‐span, 632 articles from the three world‐leading academic databases, including Wiley InterScience, Elsevier ScienceDirect, and SCI Expanded, were retrieved and 324 were analyzed using CATA software (Concordance 3.20), to identify the vocabulary that was used frequently by e‐government scholars. Then the distinct vocabulary was used to construct the widely shared definition of e‐government.

In those 324 articles, 57 words generated from the text analysis formed the basis for imputing a widely shared definition of the field of e‐government. The definition was conceptualized by six elements.

Two limitations of the pool of articles selected may be noted. First, articles were drawn from three leading academic databases in an effort to distinguish e‐government from other fields; but such an approach omitted any consideration of how e‐government definitions varied from different academic fields. Second, because the pool of articles was drawn only from these three, journals excluded by these databases were thus omitted.

The study is unique in that it discusses the definition of e‐government by an exploratory approach. The universal shared definition extracted could serve as either a screen or a magnet for future research. And the methodology could be applied to several academic fields, including administration and management, library and information science, e‐records management, computer science, etc.

This paper aims to compare the Greek and Chinese rhetorical traditions and explore their influences on today’s business and marketing communication across relevant cultures. In particular, it uses the Aristotelian persuasive orientations as reference points to introduce the Chinese rhetoric, and interpret cultural differences in persuasion from a historical and sociocultural perspective. It has been found that Greek and Chinese rhetoric and persuasion were developed to meet the needs of the social and cultural environments and this rule still applies to today’s business communication. The logical approach has been emphasised in the English rhetorical tradition while both qing (emotional approach) and li (logical approach) are the focus of persuasion in the Chinese tradition. This difference is also the root of cultural differences in modern business communication. Findings from both English and Chinese texts and data are examined to substantiate our focal argument.