E-commerce Adoption And Usage In Cultural Events:Hajj In Saudi Arabia - Research Paper Example

This research project deals with the introduction of e-Commerce to culturally significant events. As a case study, the Islamic pilgrimage (or Hajj as it is known) will be the focus of the research. As such, this research will deal with a culturally and religiously significant event that is time-limited and observed by people from multiple cultures (Hajj 2010).   E-commerce has been growing since the mid-1990s (Sasa 2000). Towards the end of the 1990s, it was clear that the world’s largest economic power was determined to ensure that e-commerce would flourish in the new world economy (Clinton and Gore Jr. 1997). In many ways, the growth of e-commerce may be associated with the expansion of global trade from the 1980s onwards (Easton 2007).

The reason is simple, e-commerce is built on the telecommunications networks and applications that have made world trade more efficient (along with transport and energy technologies) (Nayyar 2006; Easton 2007). E-commerce has two main different forms, business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B), and the fact that the Business to Business B2B is one of the largest forms where the e-commerce activity takes place worldwide. The B2B situation is a worldwide mechanism by which businesses interact with other business partners for exchanging goods and services between the two entities.

However, government to citizen (G2C) may also be recognized as another form of e-commerce. Essentially e-commerce is trade over telecommunications networks, which is why it has grown largely due to the growth of the Internet (Sasa 2000). The Internet is actually a group of protocols that define how computers and networks should communicate with each other (Farrel 2004). The significance of the Internet is that it allows networks built with different physical characteristics to communicate with each other (Farrel 2004).

An outgrowth of a US military network (Leiner, Cole, et al. 1985), the internet is currently deployed globally and has transformed the way that information is shared in both real-time and non-real-time (Farrel 2004).