Adoption of General Purpose Technologies : Understanding Adoption Patterns in the Electrification of Us Manufacturing 1880-1930

Past study of the diffusion of pervasive technologies, such as the electric motor, has failed to take into account the varied technological challenges in their application. In a careful examination of the adoption patterns of the electric motor in three industries, automobile manufacture, printing and papermaking, I establish that the technological difficulty of adapting the motor to particular tasks has central explanatory power in the order of adoption. I also find significant variation in the level of difficulty in developing and implementing much trumpeted organizational changes documented by other economic historians. A key finding of the study is that significant variation in adoption rates can be found not only between industries, but also between different processes within industries and firms. A failure to investigate at the micro-level has led some authors to making sweeping and incorrect generalizations about the diffusion process. The analysis suggests that an understanding of diffusion patterns of new technologies is highly dependent on an understanding of their varied uses