THE PLACE OF INNOVATIVENESS IN MODELS OF THE ADOPTION PROCESS - AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW

Apparent differences among four major theoretical views (Hirschman; Midgley and Dowling; Foxall; and Goldsmith) of the place of innovativeness in the adoption process are resolved in a preliminary way in terms of selected work from the more extensive, continuing validation research on Kirton's adoption-innovation inventory. To approach the nature of innovativeness in terms of criterion-related validity is shown to be useful in sorting out the relation of innovativeness to other personality constructs and to shift the focus of the work from more ambitious theoretical modeling efforts to work that is concerned with the more modest objective of predicting actual adoption behavior. © 1990.