E-mail in Organisational Power and Politics

Given the increased penetration of information technologies in private, domestic, public and working spaces and environments, the diffusion of these technologies becomes a very important issue to study. In general, theories of technological innovations analyse the mechanisms of socio-economic processes underlying diffusion (Rogers, 1983; Flichy, 1995; Valente, 1995). According to the pioneering work of Everett Rogers (1983), the eventual adoption of a technological innovation depends on the following five factors: (i) the relative advantage, which can be measured in economical terms but also in terms of social prestige and satisfaction, (ii) the compatibility with the values of the appropriating group, (iii) the complexity, (iv) the triability and (iv) the observability of the innovation. Similarly, according to Rogers, the corresponding decision processes follow five stages: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation. Furthermore, Rogers distinguishes five groups of users: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Through these different typologies, it is possible to follow the time evolution of the adoption rate, which, as generally is the case in economics, constitutes the essential descriptive variable of diffusion processes and turns out to be described by an S-curve (Rogers, 1983).