Although the educational community has learned much about better educational practices, less is known about processes for implementing new practices. The standard model of diffusion suggests that people change perceptions about the value of an innovation through communication, and these perceptions then drive implementation. But implementation can be affected by more instrumental forces. In particular, members of a school share the common fate of the organization and affiliate with the common social system of the organization. Thus, they are more able to gain access to each others' expertise informally and are more likely to respond to social pressure to implement an innovation, regardless of their own perceptions of the value of the innovation. This article characterizes informal access to expertise and responses to social pressure as manifestations of social capital. Using longitudinal and network data in a study of the implementation of computer technology in six schools, the authors found that the effects of perceived social pressure and access to expertise through help and talk were at least as important as the effects of traditional constructs. By implication, change agents should attend to local social capital processes that are related to the implementation of educational innovations or reforms.

Although research on social embeddedness and social capital confirms the value of friendship networks, little has been written about how social relations form and are structured by social instituti...

Although knowledge has been linked to productivity within and between organizations, little is known about how knowledge flows into schools and then diffuses from teacher to teacher within schools. Here, the authors hypothesize that the value of different sources of knowledge depends on a teacher’s current level of implementation. The authors test their theory using longitudinal network data from 470 teachers in 13 schools. From models of change (i.e., first differences) in teachers’ use of computers over a one-year period, the authors infer that the more a teacher at the lowest initial levels of implementing an innovation is exposed to professional development focused on student learning, the more she increases her level of implementation (focus); the more a teacher at an intermediate initial level of implementation has opportunities to experiment and explore, the more she sustains her level of implementation (fiddle); and the more a teacher at a high initial level of implementation accesses the knowledge of others, the more she increases her level of implementation (friends). Concerning the potential for selection bias, the authors quantify how large the impacts (Frank 2000) of confounding variables must be to invalidate their inferences. In the discussion, the authors emphasize the changing nature of knowledge through the diffusion process.