Diffusion Through Interdependent Co-Origination

Abstract

This dissertation advances the thesis that the discursive process entailed in phenomena of diffusion constitutes a genuine aspect of market innovation – that is in the innovation of a value proposition that can be meaningful to some segment of society. This claim runs counter to much of current diffusion research in marketing which still limits the conceptual and empirical boundaries of diffusion to processes of interpersonal influence and there upon traces an innovation’s -- that is its value proposition’s -- simple acceptance or adoption.By drawing on social psychological thought and scholarship that studied the social creation of knowledge, this dissertation aims to show that the dimension of market novelty of an innovation, that is its dimension of unfamiliarity, creates the necessity for its re-presentation around familiar images, concepts and ideas. As each discourse is socially situated, representations are constantly elaborated and enlarged to achieve new alignments with a particular social and cultural reality while they grow semantically remote from the conceptions and core images of a technical or engineering context from which they were initially drawn.