Einstein’s Abstracts

Each year, nearly 20 percent of the national energy budget is used for home space and water heating. Solar thermal technologies could meet a large fraction of these needs and thereby help to mitigate the current U.S. energy dilemna. But they are far from the point of widespread diffusion in the homebuilding industry. Drawing on the theoretical literature on innovation, this thesis aims to broaden the traditional perspective on innovation acceptance, and to suggest additional means for facilitating acceptance of the technology. Central to the analysis is the view that innovations are not likely to be accepted on the basis of their intrinsic characteristics alone. Rather, innovation acceptance is a more complex process, set in the context of a larger "institutional" environment. How an innovation is seen is partly a function of the "process" in which it is encountered in terms of the existing institutional environment. To investigate this proposition and identify the forces contributing to innovation acceptance, the thesis examines three cases in which solar therma