Contact: Ralph Derickson

Matthew A. Zook and Thomas R. Leinbach

E-commerce “is basically the buying and selling of goods and services via telecommunications networks (especially the Internet) when the customer and the merchant are in different geographical places.”

-- Thomas R. Leinbach,
professor,
Geography
Matthew A. Zook,
assistant professor,
Geography,
College of Arts and Sciences,
University of Kentucky

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 2, 2005) -- Two University of Kentucky Department of Geography faculty members have been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for a project titled “Connecting Cyberspace to Place: Understanding the Evolution of Transactions and Value Chains in Electronic Commerce.”

The grant was awarded to Thomas R. Leinbach, professor of geography, and Matthew A. Zook, assistant professor of geography, in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Leinbach, who has a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University, and Zook, whose doctorate is from the University of California, Berkeley, said the project “will emphasize the forms, processes and geographics of e-commerce across a set of manufacturing firms in the United States.”

E-commerce, they noted, “is basically the buying and selling of goods and services via telecommunications networks (especially the Internet) when the customer and the merchant are in different geographical places.” Of the several forms of e-commerce, they said, “the business-to-business (B2B) variety has generated many more transactions and much more revenue than has business-to-individual-consumer (B2C) transactions.”

“More specifically,” the researchers added, “the project will examine how e-commerce contributes to firms’ competitive advantage through the reformulation of value chains (comparing physical to virtual) and thereby affecting existing geographies of production, distribution and sales.”

Leinbach, who has been a faculty member at UK since 1978, is interested in the interwoven themes of e-commerce, industrialization, technology and regional development. His research has emphasized the study of economic development in Southeast Asia (especially Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia). A recent NSF grant has examined the impact of air cargo services upon the electronics industry in the region. In addition to NSF, his work has been supported through a University of Kentucky Research Professorship, Fulbright-Hays awards, and the National Geographic Society. His recent books include the co-edited, “Worlds of E-Commerce (Wiley, 2001)” and “ Indonesia’s Rural Economy: Mobility, Work and Enterprise (U. Washington, 2004).”

Zook joined the UK faculty in 2001 and has an extensive record of peer-reviewed articles on geographical aspects of the Internet with a particular emphasis on the rise and fall of dot-com companies in the 1990s. His most recent book, “The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture Capital, Dot-coms and Local Knowledge,” was published by Blackwell Publishers in 2005.