Between expectations and outcomes: Technology adopters' narratives and technology discourse dynamics

Expectations propel the evolution of emerging technologies, yet existing research generally assumes that expectations are gradually displaced by concrete outcomes as technologies mature and become widely accepted. We revisit this assumption by examining how technology adopters' temporal framings of technology performance, their expressions of concrete outcomes of technology adoption, and the broader technology discourse reflected in trade-press coverage relate to one another over time. We illuminate these patterns by tracing 21 years (2002−2022) of radio-frequency identification (RFID) adoption and analysing adopters' statements in 407 case stories published in The RFID Journal, coupled with a longitudinal corpus of trade-press coverage from the same period. Manual coding of adopters' expressions of concrete realised benefits and challenges in the case stories is combined with a purpose-built dictionary that detects five temporal positions in adopters' framings of RFID performance. We find that associations between concrete outcomes and temporal framings are selective and stage-dependent. Concrete outcomes do not simply replace expectations, instead, they become associated with specific temporal framings over time. We also find that adopters' temporal framings are associated with trade-press coverage in stage-specific ways that change over time, often amplifying but also sometimes tempering broader attention to RFID. We contribute to research on technology framing and expectations dynamics by foregrounding adopters as co-constructors of technology discourse, challenging the displacement assumption with a stage-sensitive explanation of expectation–outcome dynamics, and introducing a replicable, dictionary-based approach for large-scale analysis of temporal framings in technology narratives.