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The purpose of this paper is to call for a scrutiny of the dualist approach to business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) marketing in industries driven by consumer-generated content. It posits that individual consumer-centric factors are influential for B2B marketing as well in sectors such as the travel industry and investigates the determinants of tourists’ intention to use social media websites for travel planning.

Integrating constructs from IS and marketing literature, the paper proposes information quality and perceived enjoyment as antecedents of perceived usefulness, attitude and intention to use. The research model is tested using data from social media users with experience in travel planning.

Results show that perceived usefulness and information quality are stronger predictors of attitude and behavioral intention than perceived enjoyment. Enjoyment was not found to be strongly influential. Relevancy and reliability of information and its usefulness concerning travel-planning needs were found more influential.

Data were collected from social media users, raising possible issues of representativeness.

The paper offers clarity regarding antecedents of downstream user behavior which can be of significant value. Demarcations in B2B and B2C perspectives blur in the context of social media, enabling more effective integration.

The paper brings in and validates the roles of information quality and enjoyment as influencers of behavior. Identifying the travel industry as a sector having greater likelihood of B2BC convergence, the paper extends IS adoption research to user-interactive sites in the travel-planning context, which can benefit the consumer as well as the supply side.

Advances in information and communications technology have allowed for a wide range of electronic business models and applications. These applications are providing a competitive advantage for organizations by creating efficiencies and cost reductions. Electronic business should be part of the overall corporate strategy and be integrated into core business processes. This study provides interesting insights into electronic business applications in large corporations and discusses similarities and differences that exist between Swedish and American corporations.

Many factors in today's competitive and global business environment contribute to an organization's financial success. A business enterprise's management must adopt a strategy that fully exploits information technology's power as a key element in order to optimize the organization's competitiveness. Recent spectacular technological advances and breakthroughs have made the effective use of modern information technology a critical, competitive business weapon.

Information systems is an area of the business enterprise that is growing in terms of increased legitimacy. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find an organization that does not use information technology in some form or that is not affected by information systems.

Compares the processes for decision making during the acquisition of equipment and materials among firms in the USA, Sweden, France and Southeast Asia. Reports the findings from a detailed questionnaire in which 236 firms in the four‐country area participated. The companies provided data on buying centre influences and supplier search criteria with half reporting for capital production equipment acquisition and the other half for key production materials. It was found that buying decisions in Sweden have the highest team effort while the USA has the least, even though the American and Swedish firms had very similar demographics. Sweden depended on technical staff, both their own and suppliers′, much more than the other countries. There was no consistent pattern for purchasing department involvement. Except for the USA capital equipment buying centres were much more inclusive than materials buying centres.

Investigates the increasing interest by educators to provide students with the international management and research skills that are becoming more necessary as we enter the twenty‐first century. Highlights the need for the internationalisation of curriculum, as well as the faculty and instructors who teach such courses. Presents two cases of such internationalisation efforts in Iran and Sweden. Explores the internationalisation of the courses and the instructors who taught them over a three‐year period; certain positive and negative aspects to these experiences are identified and presented. Suggests that such research on the successes and failures in such cases serve as a foundation to continue research in other settings, so as to learn more about how to continue with efforts to internationalise both curriculum and faculty.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between a firm's “ICON” archetype, turbulence in its operating environment and its performance.

A questionnaire‐based survey of 258 marketing managers in South Africa used a modified ICON scale to identify archetypes, assess perceived turbulence, and measure performance with respect to profitability, market share and growth rate.

The archetype to which a firm conforms depends to some extent on its perception of environmental turbulence, and has an influence on all aspects of its performance. “Isolate” firms tend to under‐perform on all measures; “shapers” exhibit significantly higher rates of growth.

The limitations are associated with mail surveys, single‐respondent bias, and subjective assessment of performance. The study nevertheless demonstrates the validity and usefulness of the ICON matrix and scale, and sets directions for further investigation.

Offers a simple yet powerful way for marketing managers and planners to identify their firm's ICON archetype, and illustrates the impact it can have on performance.

A managerially useful adaptation of the original ICON scale is applied beyond the conventional setting of North America or Europe, in a challenging managerial environment.

Despite the growth in adoption of technology by governments, the assessment of quality in electronically delivered public services has been relatively lacking. Past researches on information systems have identified information and service quality, system use, playfulness, and system design quality as critical factors of successful service delivery in e‐commerce. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the applicability of system and information quality criteria in evaluating government e‐services websites. The main research problem identified in this study was “what are the system and information quality characteristics of government service delivery websites?”

Based on a survey of 97 Municipalities from all the 21 regions of Sweden, the authors examine the presence of system quality features, specifically functionality, navigation, and accessibility; and measures of information quality in government websites. A systematic random sampling was chosen as the suitable approach; 290 municipalities are organized in 21 counties and we have chosen every 3rd number of municipalities from the list. An online survey was conducted, with 408 valid responses taken. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted for system and information quality.

Results indicate that accessibility and the navigation facility are important in determining a citizen's perceived system quality. Information preciseness, timeliness, and sufficiency were found to be key measures of information quality in government e‐services. Furthermore, an important finding from this research is that theories from information systems (IS), e‐commerce, and marketing were found to be applicable in assessing government e‐tax services within the broader area of government‐to‐citizen (G2C) service delivery systems. In addition, a quantitative study was conducted among citizens to determine system and information quality characteristics.

The results presented in this paper can help the authorities to identify key quality criteria for e‐tax services that are valued by citizens and consequently improve service levels. Taking the context into consideration, additional variables are incorporated from literature that spans several disciplines (IS, e‐commerce, and marketing), and some re‐specifications are made to identify system and information quality criteria in the context of an e‐tax filing service, which was the main theoretical contribution of this study.

This paper aims to gain a better understanding of how Swedish branded goods manufacturers (BGMs) deal with the increased usage of private labels.

The approach takes the form of answering the three research questions of this study: how private labels are viewed by BGMs on the Swedish market; how Swedish BGMs strategically respond to the increases in private labels; and how the benefits and drawbacks of these strategic responses are perceived by Swedish BGMs. A contrasting multiple case study of four Swedish companies in the fast‐moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry was used.

The perceived advantages of private labels are connected to their overall control of the market in which they operate, whereas the advantages of BGMs are seen to be linked to product development and superior brand reputation. BGMs respond to private labels by taking them seriously and striving to increase the perceived distance of their brands from private labels in the eyes of the consumers. The overall benefit of these strategies is perceived to be preparedness for increased private label competition, while the drawbacks vary between companies.

In addition to empirical testing based on previous research on private label competition in a new setting, the study also presents suggestions for future research and the implications of the findings for managers.

Findings indicate that BGMs should take the emergence of private labels seriously, while at the same time striving to maintain good business relationships with the retailers.

The study provides insights into the competitive situation between private labels and the manufacturer brands in the Swedish FMCG market.

The classic case for competitiveness as a force driving change was made by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species by Natural Selection (1859). Adaptation, the ability to react successfully to a changed environment, accounts for multiplicity in the world of nature. Long billed birds are better able to dip beneath the surface of shallow lagoons for their food; the sharp, hard, short beaks of certain finches allow them to crack nuts and seeds. Darwin's reading of nature, so immediately popular and at the same time so controversial, fit well within the goals of nineteenth‐century scientific thought. Tracing the causes of change to fixed, logical patterns allowed scientists to remove non‐objective elements from their equations for evolution. Such issues as value, valor, or virtue held no place in a system of analysis unless they had survival value.