Discursive Fields and the Diversity-Coherence Paradox: An Ecological Perspective on the Blockchain Community Discourse
Authors: Miranda, Shaila M.; Wang, Dawei (David); Tian, Chuan (Annie)
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2022)
<jats:p>Innovation breakthroughs prompt sensemaking discourses that promote community learning and socially construct the innovation. Through this discourse, interested actors advance diverse frames, appealing to consumers with disparate preferences but raising concerns for the coherence of that discourse. We unpack this diversity-coherence paradox by recasting coherence as the relatedness of innovation frames and spotlighting the role of discursive fields that circumscribe meaning. Our empirical context is the first six years of blockchain discourse across seven discursive fields. Our research offers three insights in furtherance of an ecological perspective on innovation discourse. First, framing diversity emanates from discursive fields rather than from actors. Second, fields play differentiated roles in the framing process. Enactment fields comprised of actors with direct experience with the technology limit diversity. They do so by erecting walls that circumscribe discourse through imprinting on their original frame and retracting from or abandoning frames learned from other fields. In contrast, mediated fields, in which actors lack direct experience with the technology, enha…