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.
Read more about this topic: Shoshana Zuboff
Famous quotes containing the words support and/or economy:
“An ordinary man will work every day for a year at shoveling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Even the priests, men of God, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)