E-Commerce Issues in Australian Manufacturing: A Newspaper Medium Perspective

This paper will present evidence to show that there is an absence of informed, broad, media discussion on e-commerce initiatives in Australia. As pointed out by several authors (Gittins, 1995), the newspaper medium is one of the main vehicles through which advisers and policymakers seek to influence society. Thus, this medium takes on the role of a public forum on national issues. However, it was found that newspapers in Australia have failed provide this role of preparing the manufacturing industries for the impact of new technologies. In this interpretive study, major Australian newspapers were examined for public discussions about e-commerce in manufacturing industries. The PEST (political, economic, social, and technological) framework was used as a lens to subdivide issues, problems, and opportunities identified in the academic e-commerce literature. This lens was then used to examine 103 newspaper articles identified, using the keywords Australian manufacturing and e-commerce in what was believed to be all the major Australian newspapers. It was found that some articles merely reported vendors’ promises of potential cost savings while overlooking the need for investment in technology, training, and maintenance costs; other discussions focused on “users as victims” issues, such as security and privacy. In-depth issues, such as reliability, communication protocols, bandwidth availability, and integration problems were overlooked. In particular, the problem of business strategies was ignored.