News

Schwartz Award Recipient Everett M. Rogers

By Professor Emeritus Bob Kern

Everett Rogers is a worthy recipient of the Schwartz Award. I wonder how clearly the background was set out in the nomination. One point I have is use of "his diffusion theory:" His great contribution came as the herald and contributor to that theory, not as the original author; it had been constructed and named more than a decade earlier--actually in an Iowa State research publication by Ryan and Gross, published I think in the early or mid-1940s (Ev later read it when he was a sociology grad student with George Beal and Joe Bohlen.) Beal and Bohlen were the early spokesmen for the Diffusion Process--in fact they did a research publication that used the term. (Ag Extension had published a popular leaflet with the title [as I recall it] How Farm People Accept New Ideas, which I edited.)

Gross and Ryan are generally identified as the formulators of the stages in diffusion and identification of the several adopter categories (innovator, early adopter, etc., which were modified later by Rogers and others). A number of other sociologists were working on diffusion-adoption in the late 1940s and 1950s: Wilkening, then in North Carolina, was one of the first to introduce social psychological factors into the process; Copp, Kansas State, studied adoption among cattle producers; Rogers, working under Beal, studied adoption of the weed-killer 2,4-D by Story County (Iowa) farmers; a Missouri sociologist, Herbert Lionberger, had also published on diffusion and adoption--along with others. I think Rogers' books did much to grab interest in diffusion by scholars in numerous other fields, such as medicine, management, et al.

A watershed event in this process came early in the1950s in the person of Dr. Marvin Anderson, associate director of Cooperative Extension in Iowa. As adviser to the North Central group of rural sociologists, he asked Joe Bohlen--Iowa member of that group, to summarize current knowledge in diffusion research. Bohlen brought in George Beal, his associate in the ISU Sociology Department, and Neal Raudabaugh, a sociologist who was leading staff training for field extension workers in Iowa, to help in that task. They pulled together the state of knowledge on diffusion or adoption.

At the annual Iowa extension conference, December 1954, (I was chairman of the planning committee for that conference), we asked Beal and Bohlen to make a presentation to the Iowa staff. Flannel graph was the visual aid of choice at the time, and we helped Beal and Bohlen adapt their presentation to that aid, which used flannel mounted on four 4X8-foot plywood boards (filling the stage in MU Great Hall).

Dutch (C.R.) Elder, then director of information and Extension Editor, planned the ACE (the American Association of Agricultural College Editors) annual conference program (Omaha 1955). He booked Beal and Bohlen as a major presentation at that conference. About an hour after that presentation (June 1955), the two sociologists came up to my room in the Fontanelle Hotel, downtown Omaha. In the hour following their presentation, they had been invited to make that presentation to extension conferences in FIVE states!

The diffusion presentation was also booked by numerous commercial companies or associations (such as the National Dairy Council) in the following months.

When ACE and the Kellogg Foundation started the National Project in Agricultural Communication (NPAC) in 1955 or 56, Beal and Bohlen , as well as Roger Lawrence (extension training officer), and I (Ph. D. candidate at the time) were involved in planning the first NPAC workshop on communication. (David Berlo, then an instructor at Michigan State, got his early national exposure in a major role in that workshop); Beal and Bohlen's presentation was also a part.

One of the staff of NPAC, based at Michigan State, was Dr. John Parsey, as research director for the project. He immediately undertook a canvass to find the published and "fugitive" literature related to communication. Diffusion, of course, was a major category. By the end of the project (when the Kellogg grant expired), Parsey had gathered some 521 reports (if I remember the foreword in Rogers' first book). With the end of the project, ACE made its material available to others for purchase (of teaching materials) or gift. Everett Rogers had moved from Iowa State (after his doctorate) to Michigan State. ACE delivered the research files to him. Those files went with him when, a few years later, he moved to the University of Michigan, where he was when he did the first book (1962). He continued to pursue diffusion studies, as documented in later editions. As a result of his books and extensive research and teaching relationships around the world, he became properly the guru of diffusion theory.

I had the personal pleasure of later contacts with Ev, including a visit to Stanford University when he headed the communication research and teaching program there. Our paths occasionally crossed in other places at other times. His native courtesy and wide-ranging interests were never, in my experience, tarnished by the acclaim he earned here and abroad. I’m happy that we are enshrining him in this way with journalism at the institution where he got his start. A worthy colleague.

Bob Kern
M.S. 1955
Off-and-On Adviser to Grad Students
Adjunct Professor, 1987-88

2008-10-22