The Social Itinerary of Technical Change: Two Studies on the Diffusion of Innovation

Rapid social and technical change is the hallmark of modern, urban society. The last few years, for example, have seen an upturn in the birth rate; an invasion of small, foreign-made automobiles; the triumph of the hula hoop; the rise and fall of the sack dress; the widespread acceptance of antibiotics and tranquillizers; and so on. Despite all of this, there are surprisingly few studies of the diffusion of innovation in the sense of tracing the movement of: 1) a given new practice; 2) over time; 3) through specific channels of communication; 4) within a social structure. This is all the more remarkable given that one would be hard put even to define various fields of behavioral research without reference to the process of diffusion. Marketing, for example, obviously, has to do with the diffusion of products; anthropology has to do with the transmission and change of culture; sociology is concerned, among other things, with the consequences of technical change, or with the spread of fads and fashions. Yet, these additions have tended to ignore the itinerary of change in the sense in which the diffusion process is defined above.