Back in the 80’s, everybody talked about "Raradigm Shifts’-you never hear of them these days. Has the term become trite? Or is that nobody realy knew what a paradigm was?
Buzzword of the day. Pure and simple.
Most of the people using the word didn’t have a clue what it meant. It was just the cool new word that you used to show you were a corporate hotshot.
We’re too busy thinking outside the box to bother with paradigms any longer…
Back in the late 80s, we were going to call our boat Paradigm Lost, but we figured we’d cause ourself problems over the radio. Be careful about saying “lost” when talking to the Coast Guard. :eek:
I used this term just the other day. It actually stopped the flow of the conversation and everybody involved basically patted me on the back to tell me what a vocabulary genius I was.
I’ve never really though of paradigm as being a five dollar word myself but there you have it.
I still hear it from time to time (no I wasn’t there when SHAKES said it heh). The thing is, a paradigm shift is a true thing and sometimes ya need that phrase to express the notion.
I do however agree that it was over-used (often in the wrong context) for a while, there.
FCM surely you’ve escaped the box and are now on the bleeding edge, yes?
People are far too busy synergistically leveraging their mind share to enable their ducks to be lined up along the waterfront before someone mows their grass to worry about paradigm shifts.
This is weird; my friend and I were just talking about paradigm shifts today. Just in the sense that her field (Anthropology) seems to be making a change from it’s current stance and that it’s gradually becoming irrelavent, gradually becoming harder to apply in her field. My major is international relations and after taking a few poli. sci. classes I know a bit on the some political paradigms (liberalism, realism, socialism, feminism) and now I’m learning about economic paradigms (economic liberalism, economic nationalism, socialism). I couldn’t imagine talking about these kinds of things to people who haven’t learned about it…there aren’t many people who question the current policies and stances of global actors, everything just is. Then again, learning about paradigms and their pros and cons takes some time to sink in for me, even though it’s fascinating.
(If it helps any we were both born in the late 80s.)
That term was big in the 80s? I read it for the first time in Jurassic Park in 1990, and I figured it was new because Crichton went to the trouble of explaining what it means in detail, like it was a rare, high-fallutin’ mathematical thing.
And if I’m thinking of the wrong kind of paradigm, please feel free to ignore me. :smack:
I remember hearing “Change for a paradigm” a lot in the early 90s.
To be fair, it was really only Scooby Doo who was doing that…
Sounds like something our stakeholders should get on board with, before our competitors drink our milkshake.
I think the introduction of paddle shifting, CVT’s, and semi-automatics transmissions pretty much ruined it all.
To say “Paradigm CVT” just doesn’t sound the same.
After which you were living outside the box?
When I was a child, I used to DREAM of living outside the box!
Yeah, after their first single these guys never got respect.
It’s from Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in, what, the '50s or '60s.
Of course, Kuhn was really just cribbing from Charles Fort…
“Paradigm” (in the recent sense) started as a term used by Thomas Kuhn in his philosophy of science. He was pushing the idea that the history of science wasn’t a continuous progression from ignorance to knowledge but involved radical changes of world view so that the questions, methods, and picture of the world after a scientific revolution would be radically different from before. (Obviously I’m oversimplifying here.) From there the phrase seemed to filter down to b-school and to management books before being mocked to death by the Simpsons and others.
Lady: We at the network want a dog with attitude. He’s edgy, he’s “in
your face.” You’ve heard the expression “let’s get busy”?
Well, this is a dog who gets “biz-zay!” Consistently and
thoroughly.
Krusty: So he’s proactive, huh?
Lady: Oh, God, yes. We’re talking about a totally outrageous
paradigm.
Meyer: Excuse me, but “proactive” and “paradigm”? Aren’t these just
buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
[backpedaling] Not that I’m accusing you of anything like that.
[pause] I’m fired, aren’t I?
Myers: Oh, yes
Come to think of it, you don’t hear “proactive” much anymore either.
“Sea change” seems to have replaced it.
It’s a twenty-cent word.