Infectious Ideas: Why Do Radical Innovations Take Root?

Authors

Steven Pfaff, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Editorial

Publication Date

3-18-2021

Abstract

"Living in the midst of a pandemic, we have all become familiar with the idea of contagion. An epidemic spreads through exposure to an infectious agent, like a novel virus. In a basic contagion model, the spread of a disease is a function of contact with the agent and its degree of infectiousness. Epidemiologists often model the risk of contagion as a function of contact (or frequency or level of contact) with the infected and the agent’s virulence.

When it comes to triggering radical institutional change, do ideas work the same way?

In a recent article, a team of sociologists and economists to which I belong posed this question in trying to account for why the Protestant Reformation spread so rapidly after Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church began in 1517. The Protestant Reformation was one of the most transformative periods in modern European (if not world) history. Martin Luther, a previously obscure theology professor at a provincial university, triggered it. That much is well known.

However, how did Luther’s movement succeed? Why did it do what previous reform movements failed to do? How did it break out of its provincial stronghold to be widely adopted across Europe?"

Comments

This article was originally published in Work in Progress: Sociology on the Economy, Work and Inequality in March 2021.

Recommended Citation

Pfaff, Steven. 2021. “Infectious Ideas: Why Do Radical Innovations Take Root?” Work in Progress: Sociology on the Economy, Work and Inequality blog, March 18, 2021. http://www.wipsociology.org/2021/03/18/infectious-ideas-why-do-radical-innovations-take-root/

Copyright

American Sociological Association

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.