Re: "I've tried it" doesn't instill interest

On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 9:09:03 AM, Alleman, Glen B. wrote:

> The paper "Mimetic Isomorphism and Technology Evaluation: Does Imitation
> Transcend Judgment?" Volume 3 Article 5, in this months Journal of the
> Association of Information Systems discusses just such issues you
> mention below. When selecting technologies or processes to support those
> technologies many other factors other than the merit of the solution
> come in play.

The article finds that a significant minority of decision makers will
choose a lower-rated technology over a higher-rated one, if other decision
makers are known to have chosen the lower. The more "important" the other
decision makers, the more likely others are to follow them. The strongest
effect shifted the distribution from 9 percent choosing the lower-rated
technology to 31 percent. The largest chi-square they got was 19.xx, which
if I recall correctly suggests that the experiment is accounting for well
under half the variability in the data.

Wittgenstein said "What can be said can be said simply." These people had
not considered that possibility.

And I quote until tired ...

  Mimetic isomorphism, bitter and acrimonious, stochastic nature, presence
  of network effects, overall selection matrices, lacuna, relatively
  pedestrian, neoclassic institutional theory, /Protestant Ethic and the
  Spirit of Capitalism/, framed as a negative endorsement by the earlier
  social psychology work of Kahneman and Tversky, ...

The bottom line remains: many other things are considered in making a
decision in addition to the directly-visible merit of the solution.

P.S. I mean this review to be neither bitter nor acrimonious. Only someone
with a large lacuna in their relatively pedestrian sense of humor would see
this article as a negative endorsement of the article.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking
than to think your way into a new way of acting.  --Millard Fuller


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