In his keynote speech at the 2023 ARCOM conference, Professor Andy Dainty encouraged Construction Management (CM) scholars “to do things differently”. He argued that for the field to uphold its legitimacy and relevance, scholars must better engage in a broader set of theoretically informed debates around which accumulations of knowledge form. How this is to be done, he did not address. Based on a phenomenology-inspired analysis and drawing on the ideas of Community of Practice, we reflect on what needs to be done to follow his advice. We introduce and discuss three scholarly orientations - community natives, expatriates, and itinerants. To do things differently, we argue that more CM scholars must act as community itinerates or expatriates and, thus, instead of only “helping the industry”, explore the relative peculiarities of AEC and understand how these can be used to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions beyond the CM filed. In doing so, scholars must also develop “discursive competence” and challenge their identity so that they primarily identify with being academics rather than being part of and serving the industry.