These two types of rejection repres

These two types of rejection represent quite different types of behavior. Unfortunately, they have seldom been distinguished in past diffusion research. Perhaps owing to the pro innovation bias that pervades much diffusion inquiry (see Chapter 3), investigatión of rejection behavior has not received much scholarly attention.

Furthermore, there is usually an implicit assumption in diffusion studies of a linear sequence of the first three stages in the innovation-decision process: knowledge, persuasion, and decision. In some cases, the actual sequence of stages might be knowledge, decision, persuasion. For example, in a Korean village that the present author once studied, a meeting of married women was called, and, after a presentation by a government change agent about the intrauterine device (IUD), a show of hands indicated that eighteen women wanted to adopt (Rogers and Kincaid, 1981). They all prmnptly marched oil to a nearby clinic to have IUDs inserted. In this case, a presumably optional innovation decision became almost a collective innovation-decision as a result of group pressure. A similar group oriented strategy for family planning was called the group planning of births in the Peoples Republic of China (Rogers and Chen, 1980). A community would decide who should have babies each year, and then married people were influenced to follow these birth plans. A somewhat similar strategy of utilizing group influence to secure the adoption of family-planning methods in Indonesian villages suggests that while the rate of adoption increases, the quality of such hdoption decisions is dubious and demands a high degree of change agent contact (Tuladhar et al., 1998).