Why and How Do Theory Groups Get Ahead in Organization Science? Groundwork for a Theory of Discursive Moves

When different theory groups (groups of scholars sharing a common set of modeling assumptions and methods of legitimating arguments) vie to explain a particular phenomenon or solve a problem relevant to the study of organizations, which one will emerge as the dominant one in the literature and why? This paper attempts to answer these questions by developing a model of interactions between theory groups and the fields of knowledge these groups try to take over. Dominant groups manage to assimilate, reduce or eliminate the content of other fields of knowledge in order to broaden their own legitimacy. To do so, they make use of discursive moves in the conceptual, methodological and substantive planes of their theories. The model is illustrated with interactions among theory groups the multi-paradigmatic field of the study of organizations