Conceptual Basis for Researching „Disruption and Disruptivity“

Heike Greschke, Lars Koch, Susann Wagenknecht

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Disruptivity is a paradoxical basic property of social reality. Societies can and must always reckon with disruptions, but often cannot foresee when a fundamental disruption will occur and in which areas it will produce which effects. This paradoxical logic of disruptivity can be seen very clearly in climate change, with which disruptive natural incidents and processes are both expected and unpredictable in the concept of “tipping points”. Also, in connection with the “digital revolution”, disruptivity in the term “disruptive innovation” has clearly inscribed itself on the horizon of social expectations. While disruption as a business model forces the economic system into a cycle of constant disruption and renewal, disruptions in larger social contexts point to the fragility and vulnerability of the social, technical or discursive orders within which they occur and are registered as such. Regardless of whether disruption in this specific case as a progressive innovation is aimed at the disruption and renewal of established companies, processes or cultural practices, as a destructive natural incident or a warlike attack that makes the material basis of social order precarious, as a biotechnological reproduction process accelerates the reconstruction of human images or, in the form of a global pandemic, forces a radical self-initiated interruption of direct human exchange relationships.

What is considered disruptive is determined in relation to those orders and systems that are being interrupted, damaged or destroyed by a disruption. Disruptions of varying intensity only exist in relation to an assumed normal course that they sabotage. They refer to what has to be processed or excluded in routines in order to achieve stability and continuity. Disruption is therefore fundamentally a relational phenomenon that repeatedly challenges existing concepts and analytical paradigms. In order to grasp the breadth of the subject area and in the sense of the greatest possible interdisciplinary connectivity, a heuristic description matrix to be sketched below is helpful, which serves the conceptual specification and classification of the respective addressed research subjects:

• Relationality: Disruptions are dependent on observer positions. It is therefore necessary to ask which explicit or implicit norms (moral, legal, aesthetic etc.) play a role in the perception and naming of disruptions and which factors influence the experience, interpretation and communication of an incident as disruption (e.g. material and cultural foundations of resilience, cultural notions of order, attention economy of the media, science-political resonance calculation, etc.).
• Situation: Disruptions can be associated with different causalities and trigger mechanisms. The question to be asked is whether the causes of disruption should be conceptualized as a linear incursion from the outside (e.g. as a comet impact that wipes out a city) or within the system (e.g. anthropogenic global warming). It is reasonable to assume that in the present, disruptions are to be found in a complex network of multiple influencing factors.
• Temporality: Disruptions can have different temporalities. The spectrum of which can range from a sudden incident (e.g. 9/11) through successive processes (e.g. biotechnological work on the human genome) to cascading delimitation (e.g. singularity of AI). In addition, individual disruptions - such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident - can result in a whole set of intrinsic temporalities in the example the acute catastrophe, then the half-lives of radiation, the presence in the media and the public, etc.
• Scope: The effects of disruptions vary in scope and often cannot be reconstructed in simple causality assumptions. In complex contemporary societies, a complicated network of triggering incidents, effects and side effects can be assumed. Among other things, it can also happen that attempts to eliminate interference produce further secondary or tertiary disruptions that can be located in very different parts of society (e.g. the interruption of supply chains as a result of the corona lockdown).
• Intensity: Depending on their intensity, disruptions have different effects on the orders in which they occur. While some denormalizations are integrated into the existing normal state after brief moments of irritation (disruption as confusion), other disruptions require a larger adaptive restructuring of the order (disruption as disturbance). Massive disruptions can even develop an irreversible compulsion to systematically rebuild order (disruption as destruction).
• Functionality: The functionality of disruptions can be assessed differently depending on the observer's point of view, temporality and intensity, etc. While in the immediate vicinity of a disruption, it is primarily the impairment of order that is registered, the greater the distance, the more the focus shifts to the creative potential for increasing interference suppression skills or building up new complexity.
• Epistemic status: Disruptive incidents oscillate between knowing and not knowing in terms of their expected probabilityand recognizability. They are the cause and the subject of different knowledge procedures and dispositions, each with their own ideas of temporality, range, situation and intensity of disruption. Corresponding arrangements for securitization would be, for example, “hygiene” (protection against external disturbances), “immunization” (statistical calculations as an instrument for increasing internal resilience, precautionary principle) and “precaution” (scenario planning as dealing with the future as a dangerous area).
• Affectivity: Disruptions affect societies to different degrees, depending on registers of observation, their temporality, their location and intensity. Depending on whether the productive or the destructive side of disruptions comes into focus, they are accompanied by differing and mutually overlapping emotional complexes. These in turn have an influence on evaluations and motivation for action. Emotional complexes, which need to be described in detail in their respective polarities and fades, are: worry - fear - anxiety - panic // amazement - hope - enjoyment - euphoria.

Disruptions are manifold. They can be understood as expected and at the same time unpredictable interruptions, damage or even destruction of social, technical, physical-material and discursive orders. Disruptions in complex societies can therefore only be explored in a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary manner in terms of their prerequisites, contexts of enabling and effects. The basis for this is provided by disciplinary research perspectives, which need to be checked problem-oriented for necessary interdisciplinary connections.

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