Diffusion of Innovation

In 1962, Everett Rogers, a thirty-year-old rural sociology professor at Ohio State University, published Diffusion of Innovations — synthesizing over 500 studies from anthropology, sociology, and education. Rogers, whose father had stubbornly refused to plant drought-resistant hybrid corn on their Iowa farm, classified adopters into five now-iconic categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The book went through five editions and became the second-most-cited work in the social sciences by the mid-2000s.