Field admissibility: explaining selective passage in organisational fields

Purpose This paper aims to develop field admissibility to explain why some claims, technologies, standards and interventions alter expectations, routines, interfaces and strategic possibilities across organisational fields, whereas others remain inert despite apparent legitimacy, design quality or sponsorship. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses problem-driven conceptual theory building, purposive integrative synthesis, construct differentiation and mechanism decomposition. It specifies the unit of analysis, outcome, mechanisms, configurational logic, boundary conditions and empirical implications; the Maxwellian analogy is retained only as a bounded heuristic. Findings Field admissibility is an object-relative, historically produced and unevenly distributed condition. Consequential passage depends on symbolic rendering, relational-political carrying, infrastructural-material inscription and temporal synchronisation. These mechanisms interact through sequencing, compensation, contradiction and bottleneck effects, while stabilisation, restriction, opening and reconfiguration alter admissibility over time. Research limitations/implications The framework requires object-specific longitudinal, comparative and processual research that identifies operative thresholds, binding constraints, competing explanations and observable consequences of passage and non-passage. Practical implications The staged diagnostic distinguishes design failure from field inadmissibility, locates the binding constraint and guides whether to redesign the object, build carriers or interfaces, resequence implementation or await an institutional window. Originality/value This paper shifts field analysis upstream from diffusion, adoption and institutionalisation to the conditions that make organisational differences receivable, conductible and consequential. It also conceptualises field power as control over categories, carriers, interfaces and temporal rhythms.