New Academic Fields as Admittance-Seeking Social Movements: The Case of Strategic Management

Numerous histories of the early days of individual academic fields have been written, but scholars generally have stopped short of proposing generalizable frameworks or testable propositions for why these focal fields survived and prospered. We integrate logics from social movement theory and the sociology of science to model the rise of an aspiring academic community as an admittance-seeking social movement consisting of three major elements: differentiation, mobilization, and legitimacy building. We offer propositions based on in-depth analysis of the rise of a specific field—strategic management—within the administrative sciences.