Sociology Plus
Diffusion of Innovation Definition
Diffusion of innovation refers to the adoption of technical innovations, new fashions, and new ideas, and to the social processes through which adoption spreads. The research tradition asks who takes up innovations, how quickly, and through what channels of influence.
Origins: Tarde and the S-Curve
Innovation research traces back to the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde — otherwise remembered because Émile Durkheim used his highly individualist model of behaviour as the foil for his own stress on the social. Tarde’s Laws of Imitation (1903) proposed that the take-up of a new idea or practice follows an italic “S”: slow initial spread, a rapid rise as most people adopt, then a flattening as the stragglers finally catch on.
The Mid-Century Revival
In the 1940s, agricultural sociologists studying the adoption of a new seed corn in Iowa revived interest in the S-curve, and researchers at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research — including Elihu Katz, Robert K. Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, and James Coleman — examined personal influence and innovation in settings ranging from doctors’ prescribing of a new drug to radio appeals for war bonds and election campaigns. One aim was to identify who innovates early or late: the first farmers to plant the new corn were the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan, the slowest the poorest and most socially isolated. Another was to establish the role of social relationships. Against the mass-society school exemplified by Theodor Adorno — which pictured atomised individuals, starved of genuine relationships, as easy prey for extremist politics — the diffusion tradition showed that social networks are central to spreading new ideas: mass communication creates awareness of an innovation, but adoption depends heavily on personal influence. Influence, moreover, proved topic-specific — in matters of fashion, for example, women tended to take their lead from younger female friends.
Models and Later Developments
Rogers (1983) proposed an influential three-stage model: a small number of people attuned to new developments adopt first, paving the way for adoption by a broad majority, while a residual group of conservatives ignores or actively resists the innovation. Research has also examined “innovative forms” — the degree of novelty involved, from incremental through radical to technology-systems and techno-economic-paradigm innovations — and the technical characteristics that shape an innovation’s range of application: in the 1980s, some 60 per cent of manufacturing establishments reported using microtechnology somewhere in production, but only 12.5 per cent had built it into their products. Wider cultural and political factors — economic conditions, management strategies, traditions of industrial relations — also shape the detailed take-up of new technology. The diffusion perspective periodically regains popularity in mass-media research, accounts of religious conversion, the social movements literature, and management studies.