Social Groups’ Attention and Opinion on the Adoption of Technological Discontinuities

Abstract

Based on our conceptual model, that incorporates social groups’ attention and opinion to a critical event, we provide an alternative explanation for firm heterogeneity in response technological discontinuities. We rely on the “spiral of silence” theory, part of the mass communication literature, to explain how public opinion can trigger incumbent response. Given that attention is a necessary prerequisite of opinion, we study the concept of audience engagement – a social group’s attention and opinion. We propose that the impact of an audience’s opinion is conditioned on its attention to the critical event. We differentiate between three audiences; where the public and the field represent external and the peers the internal audiences. We add to the extant literature on firm response to discontinuous change by focusing on outsider-driven adoption triggers, rather than firm- internal processes.