Is it ‘augmented reality’? Contesting boundary work over the definitions and organizing visions for an emerging technology across field-configuring events

Abstract

In recent years there has been growing recognition that Field-Configuring Events (FCEs) play an important role in connecting stakeholders, conferring authority to certain members, and shaping the organizing visions surrounding emerging technologies. While much of this work has examined the features of FCEs, the implications and outcomes of FCEs, and the coalescence of FCEs, this study contributes to our understanding of fields that are not converging, rather different stakeholders are actively creating and summoning new FCEs to assert authority. This case also examines the relationship between definitions and organizing visions, as the discursive and social contexts in which these boundaries are being contested. This study follows the emerging interorganizational augmented reality (AR) community, as a group that unites under the term AR but has been continually negotiating its meaning for decades. Through extensive participant observation at numerous global conferences and in-depth interviews, this study shows how various definitions originated and evolved, how new emerging artifacts have challenged definitions, how specific groups have coalesced around definitions, and the various ways that they are organizing at and across FCEs to contest these definitions. These findings of how discourse flows across FCEs contribute to our empirical understanding of the tactics that various actors engage in to draw symbolic, social, and material boundaries around a field, as well as how these debates and commitments ultimately shape the participants in the community and subsequent work that comes out of the community.