Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Abstract

A radical reformulation is proposed for explaining paradigm fragmentation. The broader topography of academic activities is conceptualized according to an academic game-theoretic analogue (GTA). According to this analogue, scholarly and academic activities reflect a competitive field of play and of plays. Criteria such as attention, compensation, awards, publications, tenure, and mobility become the scarce valued resources distributed in the game based on the plays that players enact. In an effort to reveal the heuristic potential of the theoretical analogy, these threads are traced across a broad array of humanistic and scientific theories and scholarship, including connections among Wittgenstein, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu and Lyotard. The field of Communication, and its many affiliated and cognate disciplines have been charted by a wide variety of paradigm maps (e.g., Altman & Rogoff, 1987;Anderson & Baym, 2004;Craig, 1999;Smith, 1988). There is little doubt that the communication discipline is fragmented, multi-faceted and complex (Barnett, Huh, Kim, & Park, 2011, p. 467). In fields such as communication (Eadie, 2011;Salomón, 2010;Stanfill, 2012), sociology (Puddephatt & McLaughlin, 2015), political science (Blokland, 2015) and social psychology (Green, 2015), such fragmentation has been singled out as a threat to their disciplinary status and credibility. This analysis suggests an explanation for scholarly activities that provide the raw data for such variegated maps. The analogy of game theory provides a high-level explanation for academic and scholarly activities, and provides a meta-account of the raison d'etre of scholarly activity, which is to pursue such activity while seldom recognizing its game-like nature.Disciplinary paradigms appear to be organic, ever-evolving systems of people and ideas. Kuhn (1970) proposed that paradigms may consist of very small groups, even as small as a dozen or two members, who share either similar exemplars or collective practices and beliefs. Scholarly activities are sense-making activities and language communities. As paradigms evolve, scholars often engage in sense-making to organize such paradigms along dimensions and boundaries that reflect the respective relationships among such paradigms (Foucault, 1988). Maps of these relationships represent meta-sense-making activities of these academic territories. Granting that -the map is not the territory‖ (Korzybski, 1931, p. 58), meta-theoretical paradigm maps are intended to bring order to the diversity of academic and scholarly activities that constitute a discipline (Charland, 2003;Wang, 2014). These organizing efforts reflect 