Disruption as worldview change: A Kuhnian analysis of the digital music revolution

Abstract

Why is it that technology-enabled industry disruptions appear entirely inevitable with hindsight, yet practitioners in disrupted businesses typically struggle to detect and respond appropriately to disruption while it is unfolding? We term this surprising contradiction ‘interpretive discontinuity’ and use it to problematize the established understanding of disruption in the literature. We suggest that the contradiction at the heart of interpretive discontinuity holds an important key to what exactly changes during disruption and why. By juxtaposing an empirical case of disruption in the music industry with theoretical resources sensitive to the nature of radical change – Thomas Kuhn’s work in the unrelated field of scientific practice – we demonstrate that it is productive to understand disruption as a Kuhnian paradigm shift. We are then able to trace interpretive discontinuity to the gestalt switch in worldview that accompanies such a paradigm shift. This insight sheds new light on both what is actually ‘disruptive’ about disruption and also on the limitations of prior work theorizing disruption. Our work is important because it adds to the literature on disruptive innovation important yet overlooked conceptual tools in Kuhn’s work – the role of exemplars, the worldview aspect of a paradigm, and paradigm incommensurability.