Although the digital transformation of knowledge production has put communication front and center in the production and recreation of academic fields, research on scientific communities still mostly promotes an actorcentric or institutionalist understanding of academic fields. This, we argue, points to the need for a digital transformation of our understanding of academic fields, one that does justice to the important role of communication in the production and recreation of academic fields. Therefore, in this paper, we draw on the “communicative constitution of organizations” (CCO) view to explore how academic fields are communicatively constituted. Our GABEK-based discourse analysis focuses on the communicative constitution of the academic field of corporate social responsibility. Our findings illustrate how academic fields are constituted through the enactment of three communicative practices: embedding, diverging, and converging. Furthermore, our results indicate how the communicative constitution of academic fields occurs through the sequential enactment of these practices. Our theoretical framework extends the literatures on scientific communities and CCO by beginning to develop a communication view of academic fields. These ideas also have implications for the digital transformation of social theory more generally.

Introduction

Ever since Kuhn’s (1970) canonical ideas on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scholars have been interested in how academic fields are organized as they produce and recreate social theory. Many of Kuhn’s concepts gained traction. For example, the notion of “paradigms” has become a well-established term for describing the dynamics of scientific knowledge produced by academic fields (Shepherd and Challenger, 2013). Similarly, although less well-known, the author’s writing on “scientific communities” has inspired many scholars to examine processes of organizing not just in and around organizations but academic fields. This practice has become particularly prevalent in management research. The widely observed fragmentation of this discipline (Durand et al., 2017; Hambrick, 2004; Whitley, 1984) has spurred thoughtful reflection on the organization of academic fields therein (e.g., Arend, 2016; Hambrick and Chen, 2008; Vogel, 2012). Much of the literature on the organization of academic fields is actor-centric in that it conceives of scientific communities literally as groups of scholars, mobilizing metaphors such as “tribes” (Becher and Trowler, 2001), “guilds” (Battilana et al., 2010), “chapels” (Courpasson et al., 2008), and “colleges” (Crane, 1972) to reflect the ideological character of these groups. This literature has been complemented by an institutionalist understanding of scientific communities, which foregrounds the legitimacy-building measures that are needed to establish academic fields (e.g., Biglan (1973); Bird et al. (2002); Hambrick and Chen (2008)). Although these approaches provide insightful descriptions and conceptualizations of scientific communities, they underplay an important post-Kuhnian idea: that scientific communities are constituted in and through communication (Vogel, 2012).