In an echo of more general theories of adaptation, theories of the adaptation of a scholarly field describe a process involving struggles between a core establishment committed to a relatively coherent conception of truth and various peripheral challenges to that conception. The struggles reflect a necessary tension between the developments, refinement, and exploitation of existing knowledge and methods and the exploration of possible new directions. A hallmark of effective knowledge refinement and exploitation is a tight network among researchers. Such networks thrive on easy communication, and communication thrives on unified understandings. Consensus on the fundamentals is essential. Exploration, on the other hand, involves the examination of numerous possibilities, many of them dubious. It thrives on diversity and deviance. Because the efficiencies of coherence are useful immediately, they dominate local adaptive processes of learning. However, they are invitations to long-run stagnation. With exploratory diversity, disciplines, cultures, and languages turn in upon themselves. Thus, the emphasis in adaptive theory on maintaining a mix of both exploitation and exploration. (Explorations in Organizations, James G. March, 2008, p.329)
“It is clear that a strategy of exploitation without exploration is a route to obsolescence. It is equally clear that a strategy of exploration without exploitation is a route to elimination. But it is not clear where the optimum lies between those two extremes. The problem is partly one ignorance about the distribution of costs and benefits, but it is only partly that. A deeper problem is that specifying the optimum requires comparing costs and returns across time and space. An exploitation/exploration balance that is good in the short run is likely not to be good in the long run. And a balance that is good for the individual actor is likely not to be good in the long run for the community of actors. Thus, although we cannot specify the optimum balance, we know that that optimum depends on the time and space perspective taken. More specifically, the longer the time horizon and the broader the space horizon, in general, the more the optimum moves toward exploration.” (Explorations in Organizations, 2008, p.109)