Elements Of Innovation Diffusion And The Farmers' Individual Attitude Change

This study, through description and explanation of a series of processes and mechanisms such as farmers getting information, thinking and judging, making decisions, sticking to or changing their attitudes in "HAKKA round house tour" case, is designed to summarize mutual mechanism between the elements of innovations diffusion and the change of individual attitude in XinWei- a relatively less developed social environment, and explain the constraints and influences of specific social structure and interpersonal pattern. It should be noted that the elements of innovation diffusion include individual communication behavior and social system structure which are influenced by specific social structure and interpersonal pattern.The study has two starting points. One is to provide new experience occurring in less developed society for the Rogers' Innovation Diffusion Theory. The other is to provide some examples which reflect the practice of rural development in China, so we can think deeply many issues, e.g. what farmers' subjectivity are, which factors influence the role of farmers' subjectivity, etc.In Innovation Diffusion Theory, Rogers pointed four elements: innovation, communication channels, time and social decency. According to this analysis framework, we study the case of "HAKKA round house tour" and find that:In the process of innovation and decision-making, residents of XinWei may experience five main stages: awareness, persuasion, decision-making, implementation and validation; in the awareness stage, like other less developed societies, the role of mass media channel is very weak, while that of interpersonal channel is strong; in the persuasion stage, interpersonal channel plays a more important role than mass media channel; group pressure from social and cultural background, if strong enough, may change the order of five stages; in the implementation stage, the adopters are likely to reinvent. Above characteristics are coincidences with Rogers' Innovation Diffusion Theory.In other aspects, interpersonal channel and mass media channel, through mutual cooperation and constraints, spread innovative content together. Interpersonal channel which is charactered by relative fixation and level dissemination plays a more important role, while mass media channel plays an indirect role mainly; The process of innovation and decision-making appears new stage patterns; Authoritative members in social system replace ordinary members to make decisions, and grass roots government replace the whole social system to make decisions, which leads to the result that all members in whole social system adopt the innovation at the same time, known as the "mutation-style adoption" . What's more, their decision-making sometimes may suffer prevention from professional department. These phenomena can't be explained by Rogers' Innovation Diffusion Theory. We believe the reason lies in the fact that social structure and interpersonal pattern in XinWei is different from the social environment generating Innovation Diffusion Theory. But these above can be explained reasonably from the view of "Pattern of Difference Sequence", which is the point of social structure and interpersonal pattern in XinWei.