TY - JOUR
AU - Abrahamson, Eric
AB - Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects, and Practices Travel in the Global Economy. Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón, eds. Frederiksberg, Denmark: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2005. 301 pp. $42.00, paper. What a difference two theoretical assumptions can make! Two assumptions underpin the North American diffusion-of- innovation literature, with its innovators and the innovations that diffuse across adopters, who adopt and occasionally reject them. As Rogers (1986) put it, we assume that little “reinvention” of the innovation takes place as it diffuses: the first and the last adopter are adopting or rejecting the same thing for the same reason. Or, more succinctly: Assumption 1: The innovation that spreads remains relatively invariant as it diffuses from adopter to adopter. To explain the diffusion of such invariant innovations, we need a second assumption: Assumption 2: Diffusion vectors channel the innovation from actors to other actors that adopt it for the same reason. Social networks, systems with perfect information, or a point of broadcast, can become diffusion vectors for adopters. Adopters’ need for adopting can be the same economic, political, social, or cultural need. They can make rational, boundedly rational, or imitative choices. On occasion, the choice mechanism may shift during diffusion—but 
TI - Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects, and Practices Travel in the Global Economy. Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón, eds.
JF - Administrative Science Quarterly
DO - 10.2189/asqu.51.3.512
DA - 2006-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/global-ideas-how-ideas-objects-and-practices-travel-in-the-global-9Ll7Egt0l5
SP - 512
EP - 514
VL - 51
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -