Adoption of networking and e-business practices in rural small and medium-sized enterprises

This thesis assesses the status of current rural e-business and business networking. It assesses the role of e-business and socio-economic networking in rural SMEs. The study summarizes the literature on development of rural small businesses, e-business practices, socio-economic networking, and trust building. The work builds on the premise of embeddedness of business relations in the social environment and uses Putnam's (1993) definition of social capital to develop a conceptual framework. Social capital provides an explanation of the role of socio-economic networking and trust building in the performance of e-business and its competitive position. The conceptual framework consists of business, partners, customers, and trusted third party elements, and interconnections representing trust, and information and transaction exchanges. The framework addresses the context of current developments in information and communication technologies and the transition to the era of e-business and information society.; The research built on the foundation of the literature review and the conceptual framework, and was conducted on a random sample of rural organizations from four Canadian provinces. The data gathering was organized in three phases, screening web-pages of the selected rural organizations, and then continued by structured and completed by detailed semi-structured telephone interviews. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of analyzing the data gathered was used. The data from the screening of web-pages and answers from the structured interviews were summarized quantitatively by using basic statistical methods. The final step of the analysis was a qualitative analysis of the semi-structured phone interviews. Software NUD*IST Vivo, determined for a qualitative analysis of data, was used in this step of the research.; The research findings generally supported the conceptual framework. Participants recognized the importance of new ICTs (information and communication technologies) for small rural businesses and their growing impact on their competitive position on markets. ICTs help build and develop relationships with partners and customers through richer information and better communication. Trust plays a very important role as it serves both, as an inhibitor as well as a catalyst in the processes of communication and transactions.