Construct · 6 fields · 10 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningfacilitating conditionscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to compatibility is facilitating conditions.
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The degree to which an innovation is perceived as consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters, one of Rogers's five perceived attributes, alongside relative advantage, complexity, trialability, and observability. Rogers listed three things it can be fit with and treated them as one attribute, which is the seed of every split on this map. The definition is in the adopter's perception; an innovation that is technically compatible but feels alien is, in this meaning, incompatible.[1]
Tornatzky and Klein's 1982 meta-analysis of 75 studies found that of the ten innovation characteristics examined, only compatibility, relative advantage, and complexity were consistently related to adoption and implementation. They also noted that the compatibility studies conflated two things: normative compatibility with values and norms, and practical compatibility with what adopters already do. The finding made compatibility one of the three attributes everyone measures, and the caveat about what it means went largely unread.[2]
Moore and Benbasat's Perceived Characteristics of Innovating instrument carried Rogers's attribute into IT in 1991 as a compatibility subscale about fit with work style, current situation, and the way the respondent likes to work. Karahanna, Agarwal, and Angst argued in 2006 that this pooled four distinct beliefs and separated them: compatibility with prior experience, with existing work practices, with preferred work style, and with values. Each has its own antecedents and its own effects on usefulness and ease of use, and the ones that matter differ by stage of use. The IS construct is thus a family of four, still mostly measured as one.[3][4]
Two products are compatible when they can be used together or interchangeably, so that they share a network: Katz and Shapiro modeled compatibility as a firm's choice that determines whether consumers of one product count toward the network benefits of the other. Farrell and Saloner showed in the same year that a standard can trap an industry (everyone would switch to a better one, but nobody moves first) and that compatibility, once achieved, can be a drag on innovation. Compatibility here is a property of a pair of products, chosen strategically, with the market as the unit of analysis; no one perceives anything.[5][6]
A new version of a component is backward compatible when clients written against the old version still work without change; a breaking change is one that violates this. Dig and Johnson traced how real APIs evolve and found that over 80% of the changes that broke clients were refactorings, the interface was renamed or moved, the behaviour was not. Raemaekers, van Deursen, and Visser measured the Maven repository and found breaking changes in roughly a third of releases, minor and patch versions included, so the versioning convention that is supposed to signal compatibility mostly does not. Compatibility is binary and directional: the new must accept the old, never the reverse.[7][8]
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Social psychology
whether two people get along, defined by how well one person's expressed interpersonal needs match what the other wants.Whether two people get along, defined by how their interpersonal needs mesh. Schutz's FIRO theory proposed three needs (inclusion, control, and affection) each with an expressed and a wanted side, and defined compatibility as the match between what one person expresses and the other wants. Dryer and Horowitz tested the competing predictions in 1997: on the affiliation axis, similarity produced satisfaction; on the dominance axis, complementarity did, a dominant person was happier paired with a submissive one than with another dominant. Compatibility here is a property of a dyad, symmetric by construction, and can mean opposites rather than sameness.[9][10]