查看文章

Diffusion is a central topic in strategic management and entrepreneurship. At their core, diffusion studies seek to explain “how things… get from here to there”(Katz, 1999: 145). In most cases, however, researchers cannot directly assess whether and when a “thing” actually has moved from “here” to “there” and must rely, therefore, on proxies such as keywords and index terms to identify patterns. Unfortunately, we have little evidence on the correspondence between these proxies and “actual” diffusion patterns. In this paper, we develop four mechanisms that can account for divergence between “actual” diffusion patterns and patterns derived from two oftused measures, keywords and index terms. We then quantitatively examine the diffusion of “green chemistry” by comparing results obtained from keywords and index terms against assessments by domain experts. Our results point to considerable differences between …