About the award winning thesis

Digital disruption is rewriting every aspect of our lives, including how we work, socialise, and communicate. In just a few short years, Uber has upended the global taxi industry, YouTube, and Netflix have transformed the television and video rental markets, and iTunes and Spotify have radically altered the music industry. Digital disruption has affected organisations in many different industries and driven substantial changes across the economy. Although digital disruption has gained attention from both researchers and practitioners in recent years, it is still relatively understudied. In particular, the literature offers little to no insights into how digital disruption occurs at the industry level and the industry factors and mechanisms influencing it.

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The objective of this thesis is to advance the knowledge of digital disruption by developing new theoretical perspectives for studying how and why it occurs at the industry level. This dissertation research was carried out in three main parts, encompassing a systemic literature review, the development of a configurational theory of digital disruption and the development of a critical realist process theory of digital disruption.

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In the first part, I conducted a systemic literature review to synthesise what is already known about digital disruption and identify research gaps requiring attention. Drawing from this review, I provided clarity on the essence of digital disruption while demarcating it from related concepts. A synthesised framework was formulated, encompassing digital disruption’s multifaceted nature across multiple levels of analysis (including the artefact, individual, organisational, industry, economic, and societal levels). Based on the findings from the literature review, I identified two avenues for further research that address important gaps in the existing literature and may significantly advance our understanding of the digital disruption phenomenon.

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In the second part of this research, using a multimethod research design, I worked on developing a novel configurational theory of digital disruption. This led to the identification of two distinct types of digital disruption - destructive and transformational. This categorisation is a significant addition to the literature as it recognises the different pathways through which digital disruptions can occur. Furthermore, I developed and tested causal recipes of how four different factors or conditions combine to produce the outcome of the two different types of digital disruption.

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In the third part, I developed a critical realist process theory that explains how the emergence and actualisation of four distinct generative mechanisms lead to industry-level digital disruptions. The discovery of the four generative mechanisms not only shed new light on the process of digital disruption but also unveiled the underlying structures that contribute to digital disruption, allowing a deeper understanding of this phenomenon.

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My dissertation research makes theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions. First, both theories provide new perspectives by which to understand the digital disruption phenomenon. Second, my thesis offers methodological contributions to information systems research by demonstrating the merits of a novel multimethod design combining grounded theory with qualitative comparative analysis to develop and test an inductive configurational theory. Such an outcome would be difficult to achieve using conventional approaches. Finally, this dissertation contributes to practice, providing executives and policymakers with the tools to learn how digital disruption may occur in a focal industry, discover the industries in which digital disruption is likely to be problematic and identify how to take advantage of or respond to different types of digital disruptions.