On the Diffusion of Administrative Innovation: Performance, Fashion, or Legitimacy

IT-enabled administrative innovation has been increasingly important to managers, both in the private and public sectors, as it is considered the “silver bullet” to revive organizations out of poor performance or turbulent times. This review article examines four alternative diffusion theories of administrative innovation, namely, the performance-and-then-legitimacydriven theory, the diminishing-mimetic-isomorphism theory, the fashion-and-then-abandon-by-performance theory, and the performance-fashion-legitimacy theory. The conclusion is that each theory appears likely to hold only in certain conditions, and none of them comes out as the absolute explanation for the diffusion process. The possibility of multiple adoption pathways or conditional diffusion trajectories is suggested, and future theoretical development as well as empirical research is needed to understand the diffusion process.