Early adopters and late majority

In 1962, Rogers published his book The diffusion of innovation, which explains how ideas and innovations are spread in society and how groups are classified in this process (Rogers, 1995).

The diffusion of innovation, as the process is called, consists of the compliance of a particular element by a group of people connected to a social system over time. As Rogers (1995) put it,

‘conceptual and analytical strength is enhanced by incorporating time as an essential element in the analysis of human behavior change’ (p. 98).

Rogers (1995) proposed the curve of diffusion of innovation to describe the process through which an innovation is disseminated over time. The curve presents five categories of different adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Rogers (1995) emphasised the adoption of innovation as a social development, in which an adopter

communicates with another possible adopter about innovations. If the first adopter sees potential to make it work, then the second adopter is more inclined to follow. The innovation is adopted if a group of people believes it will enhance their utility. The decision is made based on a cost-benefit analysis (Rogers, 1995). Furthermore, innovations that agree with organisations’ earlier operations demand fewer changes and are easy to evaluate are more likely to be adopted (Gustafson et al., 2003).

Rogers (1995) developed a model of the adoption new innovations in which innovators, the first to adopt, are distinguished by how much earlier they adopt new ideas than others in the social system. The model shows percentages of the number of adopters, divided in the five adopter categories Rogers (1995) introduced. The model can be seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4—Diffusion of innovation

100

75

50

25

0 Innovators Early Early Late Laggards

2.5 % Adopters Majority Majority 16 %

13.5% 34 % 34 %

Marketshare %

Source: Rogers (1995).

The five categories that Rogers (1995) introduced are as follows.

Group 1 are the innovators. This group of people is prepared to take risks. They have a significant role in the early phase of implementation as their example makes others follow.

Group 2 consists of the early adopters. They are slightly more discrete and use the existing data of the innovators. This group is considered to have the majority of opinion leaders, and as such, it has the most important role in making the other potential candidates adopt.

Group 3, the early majority, are more conservative. They take more time to make a decision than the earlier two groups. They are seldom opinion leaders but do have regular contact with the early adopters.

Group 4, the Late Majority, adopts innovations at a later stage than the average participant.

This group is more sceptical about innovations and have less disposable wealth. They are in contact with the early majority but seldom have opinion leaders.

Group 5 is the Laggards. They are usually quite traditional or even isolated in their own social system. They interact only with others in the same group and have a hard time seeing the benefits in presented innovations. They have few or no opinion leaders.

Rogers (1995) suggested that the adopters of an innovation can be classified by the normal distribution of the time of adoption. Applying the M and standard deviation (SD) of this distribution, it is possible to classify adopters in the five categories. Rogers (1995) furthermore concluded that early adopters are less fatalistic than late adopters, defining fatalism as the ‘the degree to which an individual perceives a lack of ability to control his or her future’ (p. 273).

To simplify the following discussion, this study counts as early adopters both Rogers’s (1995) categories of innovators and early adopters, and the later adopters as the groups in the rest of Rogers’s (1995) categories. As presented in the introduction of this thesis, the very first cultural centre, Kulttuuritalo in Helsinki, was a private initiative, but except for this example,

public centres have been the innovators and early adopters. Private cultural centres have been mostly late adopters, along with the two remaining categories.

A related theory to Rogers’s (1995) categorisation of organisations into five distinct types is the incumbents/challengers distinction. Introduced by Gamson (1975), the categorisation of organisations as either incumbents or challengers has long been used social movement theory.

Gamson (1975) suggested that social movement organisations, in this case, private centres, are likely to be challengers in a political system dictated by incumbents. In public cultural centres as systems of power, the rules help the incumbents preserve power and keep challengers to the side.

The incumbents have excessive influence in the field and power to construct it to their advantage, especially the rules, regulatory frameworks and structures for the distribution of resources (Gamson, 1975). Challengers, in contrast, have limited privilege and fewer resources but also fewer prerequisites under the rules and, therefore, can propose alternative visions of the field. Fligstein and McAdam (2011) suggested that ‘in the modern world, state actors alone have the authority to intervene in, set rules for, and pronounce on the legitimacy and viability of most non-state fields’, thus giving them ‘unrivalled ability to impact the stability of most’ private organisations’ (Fligstein & McAdam, 2011, p. 8). Challengers nevertheless can change the field, especially if state actions change regulations and create new favourable circumstances or if new intruders arrive and invent extreme tactics that force the incumbent to react (Fligstein & McAdam, 2011).

This study assume that challengers have motivation to rearrange the social order. Incumbents have a strong relation to early adopters, as presented by Rogers (1995), as does the early majority with challengers. The title of this thesis refers to the distinction between incumbents and challengers.