Sustainability of the new economy: cautionary lessons of "e" fads

This paper critically evaluates the term "new economy" and argues that the rapid uptake and enthusiasm with which the term has been embraced masks continuities in industrial economies and potentially represents a misdiagnosis of events occurring in the global economy. The application and use of the term "new economy" and the rise of associated concepts of e-business and e-commerce have emerged quickly and declined rapidly as evidenced by the quantitative data presented in this paper. This has paralleled the rise and fall of the NASDAQ as one of the vehicles of the promotion of "new economy" companies and principles. In this paper, we caution about the faddish nature of "e". We argue that the emphasis in the application of the term in scholarly and popular literature highlights the dichotomy between the so-called "new economy" business and "old economy" business, where business engagement with "e" is seen as sustainable while a lack of engagement with this new paradigm is presented as leading to failure. It is the objective of the study to explore the implications of this dichotomy and it is proposed that such a dialectic representation is simplistic.