The Ongoing Process of Building a Theory of Disruption

Abstract

T he easiest way to respond to the critiques and complements the other authors in this issue have written about the model of disruption would simply be to address them head on-to accept some as useful additions or corrections and to suggest that others are ill-founded. Because this special issue of JPIM represents a unique opportunity to examine the process of theory-building as it unfolds, however, this article is structured in a way that addresses the other scholars' suggestions in the context of a model of the process by which theory is built and improved. My hope in doing so is that this issue might not just be an examination of this particular theory of disruptive innovation but that it might also constitute a case study about theory-building itself-a study that can help scholars of management in different fields to conceptualize how the theory-building process is or is not at work in their domain-and how they might help the process work better. A Model of the Theory-Building ProcessSome years ago in a doctoral seminar my students and I examined how communities of researchers in a variety of disciplines had cumulatively built bodies of understanding. Seeing some stunning commonalities in the processes these scholars had followed, we synthesized a model of the process of theory building (for a summary, see Carlile and Christensen, 2005). My students and I found this model extremely useful as we designed our own research, positioned our work within streams of prior researchers' efforts, and evaluated the reliability and validity of various papers. The present article recounts the development of the theory of disruption within the context of this model of what theory is and how it is built. It also suggests how the comments of the other authors in the current issue of JPIM might contribute to the improvement of this body of theory. In this way, I hope that both the content of this theory and the process by which it is being built might become clearer.Our model asserts that theory is built in two major stages: the descriptive stage and the normative stage. Within each of these stages, theory builders proceed through three steps. The theory-building process iterates through these three steps again and again. In the past, management researchers have quite carelessly applied the term theory to research activities pertaining to only one of these steps. Terms such as utility theory in economics and contingency theory in organization design, for example, actually refer only to an individual step in the theory-building process in their respective fields. It is more useful to think of the term theory as a body of understanding researchers build cumulatively as they iterate through each of the three steps in the descriptive and normative stages. This should be abundantly clear as we examine the theory of disruption. It already has evolved considerably as a growing group of scholars, including those whose work is published herein, have worked to refine it. Among the most notable improvements to date haveThe descriptive st...

Analysis of Open Source Software Development Iterations by Means of Burst Detection Techniques

“…This boundary excluded thus projects such as the Linux Kernel 2.6, and the Android project that we considered as outliers compared to other open source projects. We then selected specifically projects based on expectations of obtaining interesting and useful results [2]. According to this rationale, we preferred projects not part of the main cluster according to SLOCs and yearly contributors, and with a wide diffusion in the community (Figure 1).…”

Front Matter

“…Without a strong research precedent or empirical base to build on, this study became largely exploratory, or in the "observe, describe, and measure" stage of theory development (Christensen, 2006). This means that the study was inductive, with effort primarily focused on identification of the key factors or constructs that drive the overall behavior, and how those factors relate to one another.…”

Systems of Innovation, Multidisciplinarity, and Methodological Pluralism: A Realist Approach to Guide the Future of Information Systems Research and Practice

“…This approach focuses on relevant points of entry to the innovation processes under investigation (Hommen and Edquist 2008, p. 445) with the aim of producing typological theory. This kind of explanations is idiosyncratic but developed in terms of general variables (Christensen 2006). Typological theory enables practitioners to make discriminating diagnoses under emerging situations (George 1979;Hommen and Edquist 2008).…”