In this article we seek to verify how the level of structural cohesion of researchers in the field of strategy in Brazil conditions the construction of scientific knowledge in this social field. Through the analysis of clusters, taken to effect through the use of the network analysis technique, 2,332 articles were evaluated which were published in Brazilian periodicals and annals of scientific congress from 1997 to 2005. Based on the structurationist perspective of the institutional theory, we examined the role of relations between authors in the persistence and changes in themes over time. We found that the significant growth in the number of papers in the field of strategy was conditioned in terms of themes by the clusters that had been previously formed. We observed a high degree of homogeneity within the clusters even with the occurrence of heterogeneity of themes of research in the field as a whole. This indicates that embeddedness in social groups conditions what is legitimately accepted in the scientific field, implying that there are specific systems of meaning in each cluster, despite the occurrence of a certain level of communality among members of the field. This finding has obvious implications for conversation between different groups of authors.
institutional theory; structuration; social networks; scientific field; strategy in organizations
