Meaning
A fundamental change in the basic assumptions, concepts, and practices of a field or activity, in which one whole framework of thinking replaces another rather than being adjusted piecemeal. Originally a precise term of art for scientific revolutions; in everyday and business use it now more often signals sweeping change, frequently as rhetorical overkill. Formal register; outside the history and philosophy of science it often reads as inflated jargon. Regional use: General English worldwide; strongest in academic, business, and technology writing.
Origin
The phrase comes from physicist and philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962 and now one of the most-cited academic books of all time. Kuhn argued that mature science works within a paradigm, a shared set of exemplars, techniques, and assumptions, and that mounting anomalies can trigger a crisis in which one paradigm is displaced wholesale by a rival, changing what practitioners even perceive, as with the duck-rabbit illusion he used. He intended the concept for the natural sciences, but it was borrowed by sociology, economics, theology, and eventually management-speak; by the late 1990s it had become a stock business buzzword, drawing scorn from writers such as Larry Trask, who advised avoiding it as overused to the point of meaninglessness, and Martin Cohen, who called the notion a kind of intellectual virus.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Kuhnian shift
- paradigm change
- paradigmatic shift
Usage Examples
- The move from film to digital sensors forced a paradigm shift across the whole camera industry.
- Quantum computing could bring a paradigm shift in how chemists model molecular reactions.
- Every vendor at the trade show promised a paradigm shift, and almost none delivered one.