Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations
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Everett Rogers named and unified this construct in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, synthesizing hundreds of earlier studies, most directly Ryan and Gross's 1943 account of how farmers in two Iowa communities took up hybrid seed corn, which had already traced the tell-tale S-shaped curve of uptake over time. Diffusion of innovations describes the process by which a new idea, practice, or technology spreads through the members of a social system, carried by communication channels, so that the number of adopters rises slowly at first, then accelerates, then levels off. Rogers grouped adopters by how early they act into five categories, innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and laggards, and identified attributes of an innovation, such as its relative advantage, its compatibility with existing practice, and how easily it can be tried, that speed or slow its spread. What makes the construct a landmark is its reach: it supplies one shared vocabulary for uptake studied across sociology, public health, marketing, agriculture, and education, and it remains among the most cited social science frameworks for explaining how, why, and how fast new things catch on. The bare word diffusion also names an unrelated physics process, the spreading of particles from high to low concentration, which is a separate meaning and not the social construct described here.[1][2][3]
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