Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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FIGURE 14.2
Long-tailed S-curve. (From Henrich, J.,
American Anthropologist
, 103, 992,
20 01.)
Feder and Umali 1993; Berger 2001). These approaches emphasized changes occur-
ring over time in learning (increasing both knowledge of the technology and of other
actors experiences and decisions) and in the market conditions (especially credit and
pr ices).
Besley and Case (1993) highlighted the importance of marketing networks, the
relative market position (power) of adopters
vis-à-vis
one another, and learning from
the experiences of early adopters who change the landscape for late adopters.
Attempting to reconstruct the actual dynamics of real-world decision making, they
stressed the importance of modeling interdependent decision making. However, to
emphasize the significance of time dimensions, they avoided the vagaries of com-
plex technologies and focused on variety adoption among cotton growers (a simple
technology and homogeneous sample allowed the time-variant dimensions to be
accentuated). Drawing on agent-based models, Berger (2001) was able to simulate
technology diffusion within a landscape over time, but retained the assumption that
each actor was making the same innovation.
This work begins to take into account the social network findings of Granovetter
(1974, 1985) who argued that economic behavior is embedded in a network of
interpersonal relations. His work rejected the neoclassical economics assumption
of atomized individuals whose decision making is completely autonomous and
based on rational calculation of payoffs, but did not ascribe to the overly socialized
view that people's behaviors are limited by the roles they play and the variation
in their attributes. Instead, he argued that economic behavior and institutions are
constrained by or embedded in social relations, but that individuals are capable of
making independent decisions, thus allowing other factors, as we have seen above,
to play a role.
