Elsevier

Technovation

Volume 107, September 2021, 102272
Technovation

An institutional taxonomy of adoption of innovation in the classic professions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2021.102272Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The cultural-cognitive and normative pillars can explain the adoption of innovation in the classic professions.

  • We hypothesize that attitudes towards the adoption of innovations depend on the nature of innovation (i.e. trajectorial or paradigmatic).

  • Innovations that disrupt or strip away from the hands of professionals tasks to which they attach normative value (i.e. paradigmatic innovations) are set to elicit resistance to adoption, notwithstanding prospective financial payoffs.

  • Social norms may act as a transmission mechanism for the institutional pillars and enforce resistance to adoption.

Abstract

The study of technical innovation in Professional Services has attracted growing interest among scholars, who have sought to analyze the process of organizational change and service transformation. However, very little attention has been devoted to understanding the process of adoption and diffusion of technical innovation in professional sectors. In this paper, we suggest that the relevance and peculiarity of institutional dynamics at play in the professional sectors warrant a specific focus aimed at laying out how they affect adoption and diffusion of technical innovation.

In particular, we highlight that cultural-cognitive and normative pillars, embedded in the classic or regulated professions, may significantly insulate professionals from efficient-choice lenses and act as either drivers or barriers of adoption of technical innovations depending on the nature of the technology in question. Our proposed hypothesis is that institutional mechanisms act as drivers for the adoption of trajectorial innovations i.e. technologies that improve existing sets of practices and routines, and as barriers for paradigmatic innovations i.e. technologies that substantively alter existing practices and/or strip away certain tasks from the hands of professionals.

Finally, we illustrate the role that social norms play as transmission mechanism of cultural-cognitive and normative pressures.

Introduction

The study of innovation in professional services has seen rising attention among scholars, who have sought to analyze the process of organizational change and service innovation in professional services firms (Hinings et al., 1991; Dougherty, 2004; Salter and Tether, 2006; Anand et al., 2007; Gardner et al., 2008; Smets et al., 2012; Barratt and Hinings, 2015). Such a growing interest is partly motivated by the wider societal benefits that innovation in services is expected to bring with it. For instance, much attention has been recently devoted to illustrating the impact that AI-enabling technologies in the medical and in the legal sectors will likely generate in terms of improved professional judgement and wider access to the public goods of healthcare and justice (Reddy et al., 2019; Susskind and Susskind, 2015).

In spite of such a growing interest on organizational change in professional services firms, very little attention has been devoted to understanding the process of adoption and diffusion of technical innovation in the professions. In fact, these aspects seem to have been deferred to more generalist studies on adoption and diffusion of technical innovation in organizations and sectors (e.g. Rogers, 2003). However, the relevance and peculiarity of institutional dynamics at play in the professional sectors warrant a more specific focus aimed at laying out how institutional elements affect adoption and diffusion of technical innovation (Scott, 2008; Von Nordenflycht, 2010).

Numerous studies have hitherto investigated the relevance of institutional elements in shaping organizations’ decisions concerning the adoption and diffusion of innovation (e.g. Johnson, 1972; Ostlund, 1974; March and Olsen, 1976; March 1978; Dosi, 1982; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Abrahamson, 1991; Kostova and Roth 2002; Geels, 2004; Alexander, 2012; Fuenfshilling and Truffer, 2014; Coccia, 2019a and 2020). At the same time, significant work has been devoted to laying out the specific institutional mechanisms at stake in the professional context (e.g. Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Larson, 1977; Abbott, 1983, 1988, 1991;Van Mannen and Barley, 1984; Torres, 1991; Friedson, 1994; Meyer, 1994; Anheier et al., 1995; Breiger, 1995; MacDonald, 1995; Burt, 1997; Knorr-Certina, 1999; Meyer and Jepperson, 2000; Scott, 1995; 2001; 2008; Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2009; Von Nordenflycht, 2010).

In particular, Di Maggio and Powell (1983) laid out a list of institutional mechanisms – coercive, mimetic and normative pressures – that allegedly shape organizations' decisions, especially in the professional sectors. Scott (2008) further expanded on how such mechanisms unfold by highlighting three main institutional pillars – regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive – which shape the ‘rules of the game’ in the professional domain. In this respect, a common theme in the study of the professions consists in highlighting the role of professionals as both authors and recipients of institutions (Scott, 2008). In these studies, professionals are often described as crafters of ‘epistemic cultures’ that ‘create and warrant knowledge’ (Scott, 2008, p. 224), and as individuals that identify with their own occupation and attach normative value to their role and contribution to society (Van Mannen and Barley, 1984). These aspects are taken to explain a distinctive connotation of professionals as partly unmotivated by profit or financial gains (Abbott, 1983, 1988), insofar as they are partly rewarded by intangible incentives related to their contribution to societal well-being by performing high knowledge-intensive tasks.

Building on Scott's institutional account of the professions, in particular of the ‘classic’ (or regulated) professions that comprise law, accounting, architecture and medicine (Von Nordenflycht, 2010), we illustrate how the cultural-cognitive and the normative pillars shape specific attitudes towards the adoption and diffusion of innovation that set the professional context apart from other sectors and warrant prudence in employing efficient-choice lenses. In doing so, we focus on individuals (qua professionals) rather than on organizations or professional services firms. In fact, although we acknowledge the further layer of institutional complexity that organizations and firms add to decisions about adopting innovation, we defend our approach on the grounds that decisions about adoption in professional services firms can, to a certain extent, be reducible to professionals' decisions. Such a consideration stems from the fact that, unlike other organizations, professional services firms are normally led by professionals who are themselves embedded in the institutional dynamics that shape the rules of the game in the professional domain (Von Nordenflycht, 2010).

Our motivation for examining the adoption and diffusion of innovation in the classic professions is two-fold. On the one hand, we wish to illustrate how individuals' values, beliefs and heuristics have key consequences at the organizational level and can retain explanatory power in accounting for how adoption and diffusion take place in the professional context (Nelson and Winter 1982). On the other hand, recent data-driven technological advancements such as artificial intelligence (AI) are expected to bring significant disruption to long-established professional practices (Sheppard, 2015; Brooks et al., 2020; Xu and Wang, 2019; Agrawal et al., 2019). Although such technologies may yield benefits through increases in productivity, by means of improving professional judgments, and may facilitate wider access to crucial public goods (e.g. justice and healthcare), they are thought to replace certain tasks and processes that define individuals’ work and, in so doing, “can also elide or exclude important human values, necessary improvisations, and irreducibly deliberative governance” (Pasquale, 2019, p.1). In light of these changes in the wider technological landscape and the implications for professionals, we examine how institutional mechanisms shape specific attitudes towards the adoption of innovation in the professional context.

In our analysis, we build on Dosi's (1982) distinction between technological paradigms and trajectories as a further explanatory framework. While Dosi analyzes paradigms and trajectories from the perspective of innovators, in an effort to disentangle the role that demand-pull and technology-push dynamics play in driving different kinds of innovation, we employ the distinction from an adopter's point of view, with the aim of highlighting how different kinds of innovation elicit different responses from prospective users. In this respect, we characterize trajectorial innovations as preserving already existing sets of practices and routines, while improving their efficiency, and as supporting the adopter in performing their tasks; whereas paradigmatic innovations are assumed to substantively alter practices and routines and strip away entirely certain tasks from the hands of the adopter.

We argue that the distinction between paradigms and trajectories can fruitfully inform the study of adoption and diffusion of innovation in the professional context. Our main hypothesis is that Scott's cultural-cognitive and normative mechanisms exert pressures, which, in turn, shape opposing attitudes, according to whether innovations are instances of paradigmatic or trajectorial shifts. In fact, we suggest that cultural-cognitive and normative mechanisms act as drivers of adoption and diffusion of trajectorial innovations, whereas they act as barriers in the context of paradigmatic shifts in technology. More specifically, we formulate the following hypotheses:

H1

Professionals would form favorable attitudes toward innovations that preserve already established practices and routines whilst improving their efficiency.

H2

Professionals would form unfavorable attitudes towards innovations that substantively alter the set of already established practices, routines and heuristics, and that would require new skills in order to be deployed.

H3

Professionals would form unfavorable attitudes towards innovations that would displace or strip away from them highly knowledge-intensive tasks.

We provide two rationales for our hypotheses which are grounded in two distinct, though related, institutional mechanisms: cultural-cognitive and normative pressures. First, technological paradigms give rise to practices and routines around which professionals develop their skills and heuristics. In particular, since professional tasks are embedded in practices shaped by technological capabilities, professionals define their expertise around tasks that are largely entrenched with technological paradigms. As a result, we argue that cultural-cognitive mechanisms, while generating positive attitudes towards innovations that are seen as competence-enhancing, by virtue of improving the efficiency of existing sets of practices and routines, shape negative attitudes towards innovations that are perceived as competence-destroying, by virtue of altering practices and routines around which professionals develop their heuristics and skills (Tushman and Anderson, 1986). In fact, the adoption of such innovations is a time-consuming process that may require rapid internalization of brand-new pieces of knowledge and radical changes in professionals’ heuristics (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 2000; Dosi and Nelson, 2010).1

The second rationale, on the other hand, concerns normative mechanisms and is grounded in Van Maanen and Barley, and Scott's characterization of professionals as individuals who strongly identify with their own occupation and who attribute normative value to it (Van Mannen and Barley, 1984; Scott, 2008). In particular, we describe professionals as intrinsically motivated to pursue realization beyond economic incentives (Deci and Ryan, 2010; Coccia, 2019b) and as constantly seeking recognition for their role in contributing to societal welfare by means of performing high knowledge-intensive tasks. In this respect, we hypothesize that normative mechanisms would shape negative attitudes towards paradigmatic innovations, such as AI-enhancing technologies, that would strip away high-knowledge intensive tasks from the hands of professionals or scale back the relevance of their professional judgment. In fact, professionals may see shifts in technological paradigms as ultimately threatening or trivializing their existing role.

Our hypotheses highlight that institutional mechanisms at stake in the professional context, while creating a fertile soil for the adoption of trajectorial innovations, are likely to generate a certain resistance to the adoption of paradigmatic changes. In fact, cultural-cognitive and normative pressures may offset prospective efficiency gains attributed to technical innovations and undermine the process of adoption.

Furthermore, following Bicchieri (2016), we show that, for such resistance to emerge, it is not necessary that all professionals share a similar normative attachment towards professional values, ideals and roles. This is, we argue, because attitudes are often codified in social norms which shape empirical and normative expectations of professionals and ‘invite’ them to comply regardless of their inner normative beliefs about the values of the profession, their contribution to societal well-being and the trade-offs linked to innovation. Even though some professionals may not share normative values and ideals that are attached to the profession, their behavior and decisions about courses of actions are largely shaped by normative expectations and informal sanctions underpinned by professional values. In this respect, we illustrate how social norms grounded in professional values, practices and routines may invite professionals to reject paradigmatic innovations in spite of idiosyncratic beliefs.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: in the first section, we outline the institutional lenses in analyzing the adoption and diffusion of innovation in the professional context by highlighting the peculiar characterization of the classic professions; in the second section, we explore the role that two main institutional mechanisms – Scott's cultural-cognitive and normative pillars – play in shaping attitudes toward the adoption of innovation in the classic professions; in the third section, we introduce the distinction between paradigmatic and trajectorial innovations from the standpoint of adopters and lay down our main hypotheses for the adoption and diffusion of innovation in the professional context; in the fourth section we illustrate how social norms could perpetuate resistance to the adoption of innovation in the face of mixed normative beliefs among professionals. Finally, we conclude by suggesting that the present work opens up an interesting path of empirical research aimed at verifying our hypotheses about the relevance that Scott's cultural-cognitive and normative pillars play in shaping professionals' attitudes toward paradigmatic innovations, and by highlighting the policy implications emerging from the present work.

Section snippets

Institutions in the classic professions

Most studies focusing on the adoption and diffusion of innovation, reviewed and integrated by Rogers (2003), have been developed under two broad and complementary perspectives. On the one hand, researchers have sought to analyse adoption from an efficient-choice standpoint. This suggests that decision-making procedures concerning adoption are modeled under assumptions of perfect rationality, relative certainty about technological capabilities and organizational goals, and in the absence of

An institutional taxonomy of adoption of innovation

In the previous section, we have highlighted how institutional mechanisms, falling under Scott's cultural-cognitive and normative pillars, may insulate decisions about the adoption of innovation from efficiency calculations and warrant institutional lenses in making sense of how such decisions take place. In this respect, while the efficient-choice approach seems to embed a pro-innovation bias in analyzing diffusion (Downs and Mohr, 1976; Kimberly, 1981; Rogers, 1962, 1983; Rogers and

Conclusions

In this paper we examined how institutional mechanisms shape specific attitudes towards the adoption and diffusion of innovation in the classic professions. Specifically, we looked at how these institutional mechanisms set the professional context apart from other industries and warrant prudence in employing efficient-choice lenses. In doing so, our paper makes three main contributions to the literature. First, we have shown that the classic professions call for institutional lenses in

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no competing interest.

Acknowledgments

The work is sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council through the following grant: Innovating Next Generation Services through Collaborative Design (ES/S010475/1).

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