Technological diffusion as a process of societal embedding: Lessons from historical automobile transitions for future electric mobility

Technological diffusion can be understood as a broader process of co-construction of technology and its environment. This article conceptualizes this co-construction as a process of societal embedding, in which new technologies find their place in wider societal domains, which include immediate user contexts, cultural meanings, policies, and infrastructures. This perspective helps address three under-developed dimensions in adoption models: (1) diffusion includes more actors than users/adopters, (2) user characteristics and environments are not known in advance, but are articulated during the... Mehr ...