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This chapter first presents a model of learning‐by‐doing and learning from others in which farmers learn about the optimal target input for a new technology by observing the input choice and yield on their own and on neighbouring farms. Because of this ‘social learning’, dynamic considerations become relevant to the technology adoption decision. It is shown how, in the presence of information spillovers, adoption by a farmer is part of a dynamic game in which the expected level of experimentation by neighbours matters. The next section presents a model of technological change where training is complementary to the new technique. The model illustrates how imperfections in the labour market result in an under‐investment in training, and how an economy may get trapped in a poor equilibrium in which insufficient training and insufficient adoption reinforce each other.

This chapter shows that political parties play different roles in Muslim countries. In some, parties participate in competitive elections; in others, a single political party manages the state apparatus; and in yet others, political parties are hollow and ineffectual. The majority of these political parties support a vibrant secular political discourse online. The chapter traces the recent history of technology adoption by political parties and presents two findings. First, whereas in the past political parties could easily own, control, and incapacitate the news media, today it is much more difficult for them to maintain the same control over digital media. Second, contrary to received wisdom, the internet has not been taken up significantly by minor parties and radical challenger groups. Rather, it is the large, long-standing political organizations that have invested in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a big way.

The final two chapters examine those factors that constrained the adoption of new technologies and the assimilation of new knowledge and expertise. Despite the centrality of technological change after 1870, it was not universal, uncontested, or unilinear. Technology and investment capital spilled over Mexico’s borders and washed across the landscape; in some places, this inundation settled and pooled; in other places, it evaporated and left few marks. Chapter 7 examines the obstacles to technological change: those factors that delayed the adoption of new technologies, that impaired their use or productive capacity in Mexico, or that prevented their adoption altogether. It focuses especially on the economic and social contexts for new technologies imported into Mexico and the ease or challenge of fitting within new markets and “production ecologies.”

This chapter describes the results of initial work analysing a panel of rural households in Peru between 1994 and 2004 to determine household responses to changes in relative prices of traditional versus export‐oriented products. Our principal interest was better to understand how household responses to external economic shocks influenced rural welfare, income distribution, and poverty. Since a large percentage of Peruvians living in poverty are located in rural areas, learning more about how these households respond to a changing external environment provides insights into the factors that influence their ability to improve their absolute and relative economic position. The results of our analysis indicate that changes in relative prices had a significant impact on the adoption of new agricultural products, and the magnitude of response was mitigated by households' degree of tenure security and access to regional and local markets. Analyses of household expenditures over the period indicate that those who adopted export crops experienced a significant growth in consumption proportional to the change in acreage devoted to exportable products, and were less likely to be classified as impoverished at the end of the period. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that this association is causal.

This chapter examines two recursive approaches to the study of technology adoption within families and the life course: actor network theory (ANT) and strong structuration theory (SST). These recursive approaches explain the reciprocal relationship between social structure and agency in the context of technology use over time. ANT rejects any dualism between technology and society, whereas SST combines structure, agency, and context to offer a comprehensive analysis of users, technologies, and their situational dimensions. The chapter first provides an overview of the theoretical commitments ANT and SST entail for the researcher before discussing the ways in which each has been, and can be, applied in the domains of family and life course studies. It also presents two case studies to illustrate the opportunities and challenges that both recursive approaches bring with them in framing and explaining relationships between technology use, family life, and life transitions.

This chapter discusses the framework that will be used in the analysis of open source software (OSS) adoption. This framework is based on Victor Gallivan's longitudinal research into the deployment of innovative client-server technology that reviewed the major traditional frameworks of technology adoption. The chapter explains the rationale for choosing this framework, including the components behind the framework and their relevance in an OSS context.

This chapter reports on the design and implementation of cross-disciplinary research methods for investigating technology adoption in later life as well as family and life course dynamics. Drawing on a mixed methods, action research project on technology and social connectedness, facilitated by a team of sociologists and human–computer interaction (HCI) researchers, it examines the use of a digital communication technology to study social isolation and loneliness in later life. The chapter first provides an overview of the deployment and feasibility design of the study, the deployment stages and procedures, data analysis and participants before discussing the lessons learned. It concludes with an assessment of the challenges and opportunities of cross-disciplinary and mixed-method research to study technologies, families, and the life course. One of the ways that cross-disciplinary mixed methods approaches can enhance family and life course studies is by capturing the immediacy of life transitions.

This chapter examines medium-term movements in Japanese productivity using a real business cycle model that accounts for the role of technology adoption in driving economic growth, and looks at the wage markup fluctuations were observed in Japan during the 1990s in relation to productivity slowdown. It discusses research and development expenditures and the speed of diffusion of new technologies, along with the evolution of output, consumption, investment, total factor productivity, and hours worked in Japan during the lost decade, especially up to 1998.

This chapter introduces a model of sampling-based reasoning and examined price competition, technology adoption and product differentiation when consumers behave according to this model. It is shown that a market for a product of no intrinsic value (a “market for quacks”) can thrive thanks to the inference errors that result from consumers’ anecdotal reasoning. Equilibrium is characterized by price dispersion. Stronger competition need not curb market exploitation of consumers, partly because firms employ product complexity as a spurious product differentiation device. Finally, competitive markets need not provide firms with incentives to “educate” boundedly rational consumers.

This book examines how information and communication technologies (ICTs) relate to family life (including intergenerational relationships, routines, norms, work, intimacy, and privacy). Drawing on theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches, it explores how ICTs are used and integrated in family dynamics and what opportunities and challenges arise from that use in a life course perspective. The book features contributions from researchers who attended conferences of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the last of which was held in 2016 in Vienna, Austria. Topics include technology adoption within family and the life course; the use of communication technologies such as emailing and texting for the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity; the impact of ICTs on storytelling processes among transnational families; and how ICTs affect the permeability of work–family borders. This chapter explains the concepts of family, generations, ICTs, and the life course before concluding with an overview of the organisation of the book.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to examine the process of “divining a digital future.” Taking ubicomp to be at once a technological and an imaginative effort, it explores the vision that has driven the ubicomp research agenda and the contemporary practices which have emerged. Drawing on cross-cultural investigations of technology adoption, the chapter argues for developing a “ubiquitous computing of the present” that takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme.

Chapter 11 then turns to how religious identity and rivalry affected developments in the Middle East from a comparative perspective. As the chapter documents, while religious pluralism within Christianity accompanied European political fragmentation and competition and it preceded the run up to the continent’s economic takeoff, inter-faith differences were an important factor in the various reactions of the Islamic world to Europe’s economic rise. The discussions culminate with a review of the social, political and institutional manifestations of those reactions as potentially being an important drag for Middle Eastern economic growth and development until recently.