SOCIOPLASTICS - 3999 — Expansion Risk - Why Growing Fields Need Discipline - Core VIII · Pentagon II · Tome IV · LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid 2026

This paper defines Expansion Risk as the structural danger faced by any growing knowledge field when expansion begins to weaken orientation, grammar and internal difference. It argues that the problem is not size but ungoverned growth: a corpus can become large without becoming shapeless if its scales, boundaries, rhythms and closures remain legible. The paper treats saturation, pacing, boundary work, refusal, niche formation and the distinction between hardened nucleus and plastic periphery as conditions of mature continuation. Expansion Risk therefore reframes growth as an architectural problem: a field survives by learning when to add, when to deepen, when to close, when to refuse and when to let the periphery remain experimental.