The fundamental thrust of consistency theories is to enforce equilibrium among one's cognitions. Man seeks haemostatic states among his cognitive elements or avoids conflicting stimuli. He loves the familiar; the unfamiliar is always discomforting and disturbing though common knowledge tells us that actual behaviour turns what seems novel at the pre-decision stage into familiar following series of learning and experience. The Heider's balance theory, Osgood's congruity model and Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory are the three popular schools of thought that provide the foundational theories of cognitive consistency This paper critically analyzed and synthesized the major theoretical and empirical body of knowledge of these schools with a view to proffering a tripartite approach (involving the consumers, the organizations and the governments) to solving inconsistency among cognitive elements (e.g.; values, beliefs, knowledge and attitudes). These schools were specifically looked into and assessed in terms of their individual real world application and/or empirical fertility. Each represents an improvement upon the other with Festinger's theory providing the most elaborate perspective of emphasizing on psychological tension and means of achieving consistency within and between the cognitive system and ultimately overt and covert behaviours.

This paper critiques the explanatory and predictive architectures of six prominent innovation adoption theories with a view to unraveling their individual capabilities in providing lenses to the understanding of the social and idiosyncratic components of small and medium enterprise (SMEs) in adopting Information Technology (IT). The analysis unravels that the existing theories, not withstanding their strengths, have failed in one way or the other to provide an integrated framework that is comprehensive in explaining and predicting IT adoption behavior by SMEs. However, the paper sought to bridge the gap in knowledge by drawing from the reviewed models, including Social Network Theory (SNT) and Actor-network Theory (ANT), to propose SocioPsycho Networks Complexity Theory (SPNCT). SPNCT integrates social, economic, psychological and other environmental variables of IT decision-making team with a view to providing more comprehensive scholarly lenses for explaining and predicting the idiosyncrasies of each actor. This model is believed to be theoretically sound and practically more realistic.