Beyond the ideal : a pragmatic view of agents' role in innovation in developing countries

The increasing influence of agents to facilitate the diffusion of innovation (DI) in developing countries may be linked to rate of maize diffusion in the Third World. Traditional DI studies offer a relatively idealised view of agents in diffusion process (Abrahamson (1991). These studies assume that innovation is beneficial and that the agent acts at the herald—spreading the word to the uninitiated (see for example Rogers and Shoemaker, 1971). We refute this idealised view of the agents’ role in the innovation process and present a case study that uses narrative event histories (Buttriss and Wilkinson 2008) to reveal a more pragmatic critical view.