The image of innovation.

摘要

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.;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.;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.