CONCEPT
Laggards
The final 16% of adopters in Rogers's typology — not failures to be corrected but rational actors making calculations from structural positions the early adopters do not occupy.
Laggards are the last 16% of any social system to adopt an innovation. The category has been systematically misunderstood since Rogers introduced it. Early readings treated laggards as traditionalists, reactionaries, or failures — people whose resistance indicated some defect of character or intelligence. Rogers spent the later decades of his career pushing back against this misreading. Laggards, he insisted, tend to have fewer resources to absorb the costs of a failed adoption, less access to the communication channels through which information flows, and stronger attachment to the practices the innovation would displace. They adopt not because they have been persuaded but because the weight of social pressure and accumulating evidence makes non-adoption costlier than adoption. Their resistance is rational in light of their structural position.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The reinterpretation of laggards is central to Rogers's repudiation of pro-innovation bias. If laggards are failures, their resistance is a problem to solve. If laggards are rational actors making calculations from structural positions, their resistance