Adoption Of Service Innovation Research Articles

Community development among toxic tailings: An interactional case study of extralocal institutions and environmental health

Using Monticello, Utah, as our case study, we apply interactional field theory to an understudied area – the impact of extralocal institutions on community development related to environmental health issues. While the role of external forces in community development efforts is acknowledged in the interactional field theory literature (e.g. Brennan, M., & Luloff, A., (2007). Exploring rural community agency differences in Ireland and Pennsylvania. Journal of Rural Studies, 23(1), 52–61; Korsching, P., Sapp, S., & El-Ghamrini, S. (2003). Rural telephone company adoption of service innovations: A community field theory approach. Rural Sociology, 68(3), 387–409), there is minimal analysis of what happens to community development when encountering these forces. Therefore, we explore what can occur when collective community action related to local toxics and community-wide illness collides with an extralocal federal agency. To accomplish this, we analyze both in-depth interview data and archival data sources. Doing so begins to address the assertion in this journal that “theories of community, including but not limited to interaction theory, must better account for the existence of structural level constraints and the various ways in which such constraints are manifested and experienced at the local level” (Theodori, G. (2008). Constraints to the development of community. Community Development.: Journal of the Community Development Society, 39, 106).

Image Congruence and the Adoption of Service Innovations

In this article, the authors investigate whether the fit between consumers’ image and the image of an innovation, commonly referred to as image congruence, has an impact on customers’ attitudes toward innovative services as well as the intention to use these new services. Moreover, situational influences (i.e., private vs. public, and friends vs. colleagues) are examined. The results of the two experiments show that not only does image congruence have a significant impact on consumer attitudes and the adoption decision, but there is also an interaction between image congruence and the consumption situation. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, consumers with low image congruence are influenced more by their surroundings than consumers with high image congruence. It seems that as long as the fit between the consumer’s self-image and the service image is high, signals from the consumer’s environment are overruled.

Innovation in the Service Sector: Some Empirical Findings

The service economy and its associated marketing practices has been receiving considerable attention in the marketing literature [2, 3, 8, 9, 10]. The primary impetus for this recognition has come from the increased importance of services to the economy as a whole [2, 17]. The nature of services has been found to cause some variations in the application of marketing concepts to services as compared with products. For instance, communication strategies for services may differ from those used for products since services cannot be displayed and are often difficult to demonstrate [4, p. 9]. These differences between products and services might also imply differences in consumer behavior patterns between the two areas. The local and personal nature of most services suggests that consumers may utilize different information sources to learn about new services than they do for products. In addition, the nonstandardized and intangible nature of services [9, pp. 34-5] could imply consumer application of different evaluative criteria and thus require different types of consumer expertise in the evaluation process. The study reported here attempts to determine the characteristics of innovators in one area of the service industry-retailing. The marketing literature contains several studies that have provided information on the characteristics of innovators in various product areas, many of which are summarized in [11]. However, to date the only studies of innovation in the service sector have concerned the adoption of service innovations by firms [8, 19] and word-of-mouth communication patterns of innovators of an automotive diagnostic service [1 ]. A related area of diffusion of innovation research has concerned the extent to which change agents (innovators and opinion leaders) exist across product