ABSTRACT
The primary purpose of this work is to undertake a comprehensive and necessarily interdisciplinary literature review on the concept of interactivity. I intend to broaden existing knowledge of interactivity by drawing from disparate academic fi elds such as media and communication theory, computer-mediated communication (CMC), marketing, advertising, and e-commerce, and thereby systematize, link, and extend familiar defi nitions, characteristics, types, and dimensions of interactivity from extant literature in these fi elds. By delineating the central properties of interactivity, I will attempt to make important strides towards the construction
of an analytical bridge between interactivity and its potential for creating business value for organizations in an e-commerce context. By reviewing the scholarly debate on interactivity, I also offer ideas for future research on managerial implications of interactivity and the business value that may result from interactions between the main participants in the electronic marketplace: the business fi rm and the customer. Essentially, I will develop propositions as fi rst principles of a (still to be built) conceptual model analyzing the effi cacy of interactive e-commerce applications and services with regard to the business value of customer integration in the electronic marketplace. It is this nexus of considerations that motivates this work. I will view interactivity not as an objective, external property of technology with deterministic impact on adoption, usage, and performance within business fi rms, but as both a system-and human-related artifact of CMC interaction (Mackenzie & Wajcman, 1985; Thomas, 1992; Williams & Edge, 1996).
