The illusion of diffusion in information systems research

I have had an interest in "technology transfer" for many years, and have been researchingand publishing work related to this domain for the last fifteen. At the present time theseinclude approximately 46 refereed papers, 22 of which are book chapters or journal articles;the others are included in international conference proceedings - mainly those of theInternational Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). IFIP is a worldwide organisationformed in 1960 following the first World Computer Congress in Paris in 1959, operating underthe auspices of UNESCO 1I have co-edited 2 books on technology transfer, one with the late Enid Mumford and others in19972 , and the other more recently in the spring of 2007 3 In 1993 I was a founding memberof IFIP Working Group 8.6 whose interests lie in the transfer and diffusion of informationtechnology, and I am one of only two members of this group to have contributed to andattended every event that the group has been engaged in. In 2006 I was elected Secretary onthe steering committee of the group. I am also a member of IFIP 8.2 - a related groupconcerned with the interaction of information technology and the organisation, and I am afounding member of the UKAIS (UK Academy of Information Systems), and the IRISAssociation (Information Systems Research in Scandinavia). Additionally I am a member ofthe British Computer Society (BCS), and the BCS special interest group (SIG) on InformationSystems Methodologies, for which I am also that group's current Secretary.My main research interest lies in theoretical accounts of technology transfer, the mostdominant of these being diffusion theory (Rogers, 1962, 1995) or variants upon this (JAM forexample), and my early papers are distinctly Rogerian in tone. However around 1993 Idiscovered Actor-Network Theory (ANT)4 , and I began to question the philosophical basisupon which diffusion theory rests. There are problems with diffusionist thinking that are neversatisfactorily addressed (by diffusionists), such as for example 'pro-innovation bias' - that isthe propensity to attribute blame to those who 'ought' to have adopted an innovation whenthey have not done so, describing this failure to adopt pejoratively using terms such as'laggards' and 'resistors' etc. They never actually question the innovation itself, assuming thisto be obvious, desirable, natural and inevitable.There are a number of other serious problems with diffusion theory, such as the extremedeterministic nature of the theory, so much indeed that its proponents are often tempted tobelieve they can predict implementation outcomes, sometimes astonishingly, using algebraicformulations to support their assertions, as if human beings were molecules of water in abeaker about to receive a few drops of dye in Brownian Motion experiment!A number of the contributions herein deal with these and (many) other problems with diffusionin some detail, but it is one thing to criticise diffusion, it is quite another to answer at least oneinevitable and far more interesting question which I have been engaged with for the last 5 or 6years, namely, if diffusion theory really is so obviously 'flawed', then how, or why has it cometo be as dominant across the cultural institutions of the western world as it so clearly has?5This submission addresses precisely this question through ten contributions that show theevolution of my own thinking on these and other matters, starting with a contribution thatcould easily be described as a classical 'diffusionist' paper. This presents a factor-basedanalysis - typical of diffusionist approaches - to describe the failure of a local authority toadopt a CASE tool for the development of software artefacts. It also presumes to 'predict' thatif these factors had been better accounted for, then success rather than failure might insteadhave been the outcome.The final contribution answers (or at least goes some way toward answering) directly thequestion above. The results of the explorations chronicled in this final contribution areperhaps surprising and controversial. Put simply, diffusionism represents a mindset that hasbeen derived from five hundred years of colonial exploitation by a few western Europeancountries and is deeply embedded in the collective psyches of western Europeans. 6 Evidencecan be found in the relationships between (for example) traditional IT specialists and usersthrough the attitudes and arguments used between these respective groups. 7 These mirrorprecisely the same attitudes and arguments that were used to justify colonialist ambition andEuropean expansionism in the past.The worldviews reflected in the first and last contributions described briefly above, representextreme contrasts. The eight additional contributions between these, map the journeybetween them over a period of a decade-and-a-half. While the content of each paper has, byvirtue of its publication, offered something of interest to someone, of no less interest is thejourney itself from diffusion to a critique of diffusionism via emerging social theory that isembedded in this work, and reflected in the accompanying commentary