The Northeast Marine Fisheries Board recently completed a comprehensive management plan tbr American lobster Homarus americanus, the most important provision of which is to raise the legal minimum size of lobsters from 81 to 88.9 mm carapace length incrementally over 5 years. Its objective is to increase egg production and recruitment, and thus reduce the likelihood of stock thilure; economic benefits are anticipated for fishermen. However, a model used to analyze the frequency distributions of some 9,000 Maine lobsters demonstrates that in every year the legal minimum size is increased, smaller numbers and less weight of lobsters would be landed than at present. After the legal measure reaches 88.9 mm, there most likely still would be fewer lobsters harvested, but a 7.9% increase in landed weight due to increases in yield/recruit. An economic analysis by two-stage least-squares regression demonstrates that these changes in catches would result in a loss in total revenue to the Maine lobster industry in all 5 years the legal measure is increased. After it has reached 88.9 mm, total revenue to lobster fishermen most likely would be 5.5% higher than it is now, a 13% internal rate of return on investment. These results suggest that increasing the legal lobster measure is problematic from the point of view of those in the industry.
problem and backgroundThe study of innovation has long held a fascination for many American social scientists. In fact, it i s one of the few topics that has been studied by sociologists, social psychologists, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and specialists in education and business administration. Over the past 40 years, enormous resources have been devoted to studying innovation and closely related topics. A large body of literature has resulted, along with a bewildering array of hypotheses. Recently, an increasing number of social scientists have come to admit that the field i s in a state of chaos and that existing models are able to explain little more of the phenomena now than they could 20 years ago. The key problem is that conclusions about the adoption of innovations drawn from one set of studies are almost always contradicted by those stemming from other studies (Rogers 1978:l). As a result, few generalizations hold in even a moderate number of cases and none are universally applicable. This situation i s underscored most forcefully by Rogers and Shoemaker (19711, who compiled the most complete review of the literature on innovation to date. They have been able to cite studies both supporting and rejecting virtually every hypothesis concerning innovation (1971:347-385), suggesting that there is something fundamentally wrong with the prevailing approach to innovation.Studies of the diffusion of innovations have produced very inconsistent results. Downs and Mohr state that the problem lies in the way innovation is conceived and argue that the diffusion of innovations can only be understood by considering the match, or compatability, between the innovations and their potential adopters, and not by studying the innovations or adopters separately and out of context. Our study of the diffusion of 78 technical innovations in the New England fin-fishery supports this viewpoint. Most of the data from our study make no sense except in terms of the Downs and Mohr hypothesis. We reach two conclusions: (7) there is no one group of fishermen who is more prone to adopt these innovations; and (21 the ethnography and a regression analysis indicate that innovations are adopted when they match the needs of the adopter. Downs and Mohr also recommend a methodology that leads to a general model of innovation. Our study indicates that their suggested methodology is flawed.
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