Factors In Technology Promotion Social Action System:a Case Study Of Feixi County,Anhui Province

Since the economic reform and openness, the agricultural economy of China has achieved significant growth due to national policies promoting agricultural development. However, compared with the rapid economic development and modernization in China, the growth of agriculture and rural development are slow, and it is difficult to raise the income level of farmers."Three Rural" issues are becoming increasingly urgent problems. To promote development of agriculture and rural area and level up farmers’ income fundamentally, we need to strengthen popularization of agricultural science and technology, and improve technique of the farmers essentially. Currently, the research of popularization of science in our country has attracted great attention of government and academia. Research on the diffusion of agricultural technology is listed as an important issue, triggering widespread interests of scholars major in communications, sociology, economics and other fields.Since the1940s, American communication scholar Rogers had done systematic studies on how farmers accepted or rejected a new technology, and proposed the theory of diffusion of innovation, which included three important viewpoints that still stand now:firstly, the diffusion of innovation is essentially a process of dissemination of technical information; secondly, it is also a dynamic process of social system; thirdly, individuals experience five stages of accepting a new innovation:knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. Together with "5W" communication theory and social action theory, the diffusion of innovation can be divided into Who, What, How, to Whom and What effects, and integrations inside each action or between actions of senders and recipients might take place during the process of diffusion, forming a sub-system of social action system.Based on the construction and analysis of the social action sub-system of the promotion of seedling technology in Feixi county, the dissertation focuses on the factors affecting the adoption of seedling technology by farmers in an empirical way. Therefore, we can examine the combined influence of individual characteristics and social environment on the actions of farmers. We applied Logistic regression analysis model, and demonstrated the irreplaceable influence of individual characteristics of farmers and three conponents of social environment, i.e., social material resources, social system patterns and social cultural backgrounds, in the promotion of seedling technology in Feixi county. We found that the individual characteristic factor "level of education", the social material resource factor "distance to the county", the social system model factor "communicate with friends and acquaintances about technology" and the social cultural background factor "production time planning" together constitute the best fit regression equation. They show very significant and important impact on the adoption of seedling technology by farmers.The theoretical significance of this study is to introduce sociological perspective to the study of the diffusion of innovation. We looked into the actions in the its process, such as spread, adoption and rejection, in a crossover angle of communications and sociology. Practical significance lies in the empirical verification of that the adoption of seedling technology by famers is affected by various factors in a combined way, which provides reference for future research.