* Academy oj Managemenl /ournal l»$8.Vol, 31. No, 4.897-923, ORGANIZATIONAL ASSIMILATION OF INNOVATIONS: A MULTILEVEL CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS

This study examined the assimilation of innovations into organizations, a process unfolding in a series of decisions to evaluate, adopt, and implement new technologies. Assimilation was conceptualized as a nine-step process and measured by tracking 300 potential adoptions through organizations during a six-year period. We advance a model suggestini; that organizational assimilation of technological innovations is deter-mined by three classes of antecedents: contextual attributes, innovation attributes, and attributes arising from the interaction of contexts and innovations Why and how do organizations evaluate, adopt, and implement innovat-ions? Few research questions have spanned so many social science discip-lines, elicited such an outpouring of empirical research, and yielded so few unequivocal findings. The literature on innovation has heen descrihed a