Although the family firm itself cannot fairly be described as a management idea, it does embody a number of distinctive features around which has been spun a specific theory about corporate behaviour. Family firms have become big business. They have their own magazine, Family Business, their own specialist community of consultants and their own academic institutions – for example, the Loyola University Chicago Family Business Centre.
The term e-commerce embraces all the ways of transacting business via electronic data: for example, the Minitel system in France, videotext systems, and direct selling by phone. But it is most closely identified with commerce transacted over the Internet, and it is the Internet that put e-commerce at the head of the corporate strategic agenda for the first years of the 21st century.
E-commerce is merely an elision of electronic commerce, but it embodies a revolutionary idea: that electronic commerce is qualitatively different from ordinary time-worn commerce, that (in the jargon) there is a paradigm shift in the way that business is conducted in the world of e-commerce. Doing business via the Internet is not only much quicker and much cheaper than other methods, it is also thought to overturn old rules about time, space and price. There is the much-vaunted death of distance: a customer 10,000 miles away becomes as accessible as one around the corner. Furthermore, economies of scale, economic laws that were assumed for centuries to be immutable, become less relevant.