Shoshana Zuboff - The Support Economy

The Support Economy

According to her account, by the mid-nineties Zuboff had begun to question the vision of the progressive corporation espoused in most management literature. Observing the tendency of firms to utilize information technologies primarily for the limited purposes of automation, cost savings, and control, she began to explore new ways that the technology’s informating power might find its full expression. This led to time out from teaching and publishing for a period of study and reflection and began a decade-long intellectual journey from which she concluded that today's business models based on the frameworks of concentration and control associated with twentieth century “managerial capitalism” had reached the limits of their adaptive range. Once the engines of wealth creation, they had turned into its impediments. The society of the twenty-first century requires a new approach to commerce based on a new "distributed capitalism."

These insights led to Zuboff's most recent book, The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She co-authored the book with her husband, former Chief Executive Jim Maxmin, using his practical experience to ground many of her new theoretical formulations. The Support Economy was published by Viking Penguin in 2002.