Thinking 'Communities of Academic Practice': on space, enterprise and governance in marketing academia

Abstract

The paper introduces the ideas that have inspired this special issue on the production of disciplinary space. It locates those ideas with regard to contemporary themes within the cut and thrust of disciplinary institutions in marketing and the practices they authorise, particularly those that shape the production and distribution of knowledge product. In the spirit of critical inquiry, we frame the discipline reflexively. This helps us to understand marketing academia as a shifting confederation of 'communities of practice' (Wenger 1998), recursively organising itself around negotiated visions of how an invisible, yet representative and influential academic institution reveals itself to itself, through conducting our academic conduct. It introduces the papers and arranges them in a contingent order. This is achieved through imputing to the papers practices that seek to expand available conceptual space, making it available for further development.