The unexpected destiny of a collaborative e-marketplace: the Agriok Case

The last few years have witnessed the emergence of electronic marketplaces as players that leverage new technologies to facilitate B2B internet-mediated collaborative business. Nowadays these players are enlarging their services, from simple intermediation to include new inter-organizational relationships. Our interest was to investigate the shift in the role and evolution of services proposed by e-marketplaces in response to the market participants’ demands. We carried out a longitudinal qualitative field study of an e-marketplace providing the outsourcing of the procurement process. Through the study of practices evolving over time we show that, as marketplaces engage in complex business processes, the market participants begin to privilege the well connected small numbers to the convenience of the openness to the entire market. The participants see the marketplace as an exclusive club whose belonging provides a strategic advantage. The technology brought forth by the marketplace participates in shaping the strategic demands of the participants which in turn demand the marketplace the redesign of its collaborative business processes. Profiting from this unintended consequence, the e-marketplace assumes the paradoxical role of strategic mediator: an agent who upholds and heightens the fences of the transactions instead of levelling them.