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Diffusion

Although diffusion research is a central part of modern social science, it has a long and sometimes contentious history, with intellectual roots in anthropology and archaeology as well as in cultural geography. Diffusion research studies both diffusion—how innovations move—and innovation itself, which is the creation of new technologies that allow humans to control their environment better, whether such technologies are artifacts (hardware) or simply ways to program how work is done (software). Its third concern is adoption—how different societies receive, reject, and modify innovations. Such studies are common not only in geography but also in agriculture, education, rural sociology, history, and business studies. Understanding the processes by which technologies are transferred—innovation, diffusion, and adoption—is highly desirable in policy development and management studies. Within geography, there have been two main “schools” of diffusion studies. The Berkeley School of cultural geography, which emerged at the University of California in the 1920s, focused mainly on early human technologies such as agriculture. The Lund School, more theoretical and mathematical, emerged at Sweden's Lund

University in the 1960s. In 2003, a new journal, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, appeared, covering diffusion studies across a variety of disciplines but with a heavy interest in case studies of technology transfer.

The Nature of Culture

The origins of diffusion research lie in 19th-century attempts to understand the nature of culture. Did human culture traits evolve in a manner analogous to biological evolution or did they appear rarely and diffuse out from a very limited number of innovation centers? Two extreme schools of thought developed. An evolutionary position that postulated the psychic unity of humanity concluded that all human beings were innately and equally innovative and that innovation was either continuous or triggered by relatively exogenous variables, such as population pressure. Driven also by notions that contact between human groups in preindustrial societies was minimal, this position led to the notion that most invention was independent and diffusion was either nonexistent or minimal. This has been described as the “utopian” theory of culture change.

At the other extreme, the second position held that there were a limited number of innovation centers or culture hearths from which key innovations such as agriculture diffused. Some argued for only one. This is usually referred to as the idea of Kulturkreis—“culture circles” of diffusion outward from the innovation center. Much early mapping of culture traits was an attempt to trace them back to a definable innovation center. For example, the remarkable data collected by the Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov in the 1920s and 1930s indicated that there were only eight centers of agricultural innovation. The implications drawn from the fact of the limited number of centers of innovation were that humans were essentially uninventive, that innovation was rare, that contagious diffusion—literally catching an innovation in a manner akin to catching a contagious disease—occurred easily even among preindustrial societies, and that people readily accepted new ideas. These conclusions form the basis of the theory of cultural change based on epidemic or extreme diffusion.

Eurocentric and other-Centric Diffusionism

Epidemic or extreme diffusionism has been accused of Eurocentrism. Such diffusionism contributed to a powerfully held and generally unquestioned belief that European societies were inherently more, perhaps even uniquely, innovative and that the way to understand world history for the past 1,000 years or so was as the result of the diffusion of superior ideas and technologies out of Europe. One of the clearest rejections of this idea, although it drifts toward Sinocentrism in consequence, came from the British scholar Joseph Needham, whose seven-volume work covers the massive number of Chinese scientific and technological innovations over time. This work clearly demonstrates that China was the source of many innovations we consider European. Additional examples of other-centric forms of diffusionism can be found.

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