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.

中文翻译：

---

世界观改变带来的颠覆：对数字音乐革命的库恩分析

为什么事后看来，技术驱动的行业颠覆似乎是完全不可避免的，而被颠覆企业的从业者通常很难在颠覆发生时发现并适当应对？我们将这种令人惊讶的矛盾称为“解释不连续性”，并用它来质疑文献中对中断的既定理解。我们认为，解释不连续性的核心矛盾是了解中断期间究竟发生什么变化以及为什么发生变化的重要关键。通过将音乐行业颠覆的经验案例与对激进变革本质敏感的理论资源（托马斯库恩在科学实践的无关领域的工作）并列，我们证明将颠覆理解为库恩范式转变是富有成效的。然后，我们能够将解释不连续性追溯到伴随这种范式转变的世界观中的格式塔转换。这一见解为颠覆的实际“颠覆性”以及先前工作理论化颠覆的局限性提供了新的启示。我们的工作很重要，因为它增加了关于颠覆性创新的文献，这些文献是库恩工作中重要但被忽视的概念工具——范例的作用、范式的世界观方面以及范式的不可通约性。