THE IMAGE OF INNOVATION (PHENOMENOLOGY, PERCEPTUAL GEOGRAPHY, SOCIOMETRY)

                         AUGLIERE, REED ALDEN; EDD

                         HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1991

                         SOCIOLOGY, THEORY AND METHODS (0344); EDUCATION, TESTS AND MEASUREMENTS (0288); INFORMATION SCIENCE (0723)
 

                         The phenomena of innovation and its spread have been scrutinized by social scientists for several
                         decades now. This scholarship has yielded many important insights; it has, however, also produced a
                         recognition that the dominant approach to research in this field, grounded in what can be called the
                         diffusion model of individual adoption, has consistently failed to accommodate individual differences in
                         the perception and utilization of innovation. In this paper we first develop a phenomenology of
                         innovation and its spread, carried out along the dimensions of both historical analysis and the immediate
                         givenness of empirical experience, and then we employ our phenomenological analysis to demonstrate
                         how the failure of the diffusion model is a consequence of the Realist philosophical assumptions which
                         underlie it. We go on to articulate an entirely new approach to the theory and measurement of innovation:
                         the centration model of individual inclination. Our model, grounded in the principles of radical
                         phenomenology, begins with the notion that all experience--including the experience of innovation--can
                         be conceived as a succession of semantically-significant representations in the consciousness of each
                         individual. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative procedures we are able to map these
                         representations--or mental 'images'--to a multi-dimensional coordinate space, where measures of the
                         semantic 'distance' between subjectively-held meanings can be taken. Over-time changes in such
                         individual 'inclinations' are the new measure of innovation and its spread. We demonstrate the application
                         of these techniques using longitudinal data collected from a higher education site, where efforts to
                         implement computer-network innovation have been underway for the past three years. By challenging
                         the Realist philosophical assumptions upon which the dominant diffusion model is built, the centration
                         model yields much more precise representations of subjective experience, allowing researchers to
                         discover the presence of innovation, to identify individuals or groups whose 'images' of innovation are
                         more or less similar, and to chart over-time changes in the 'distance' between social actors. In this way,
                         the new model stimulates new thinking about innovation as a process and promotes improved planning,
                         execution, and assessment of implementation efforts.
 
 


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