Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Support Economy, an examination of the emergence of distributed forms of capitalism:
URL = http://www.thesupporteconomy.com/biographies.shtml
"Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration.
My official title is "Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration" at the Harvard Business School, where I joined the faculty in 1981. My Ph.D. is in social psychology from Harvard University. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the relationship between individual development and work experience, based on two years of working and conducting research in the Venezuelan Telephone Company (CANTV). My undergraduate degree is in philosophy and psychology from the University of Chicago.
In 1979, I began an extensive research project aimed at understanding the implications of the diffusion of information technology for the nature of work, organization, and management. At that time, no one wanted to give me money for the research. Foundations and other funding agencies told me that computer technology was "no big deal". I persevered, and after many years of working in pulp mills, banks, and telephone companies I was able to publish In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, in 1988. The book garnered much acclaim and many regard it as the definitive work on the subject.
As the first person in my family to have a university education, let alone a scholarly career, I eagerly called my father when I was awarded tenure and an endowed Chair. He was, of course, very proud of me. "That's wonderful sweetheart," he gushed. Then he asked, "Is the chair comfortable?" I have also published dozens of essays, book reviews, and cases on the subject of information technology in the workplace, as well as on the history and future of work and management. I am very proud of "Work in the United States in the Twentieth Century", which appears in the Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (1996).
In 1994 I realized that I no longer believed in the progressive vision of the corporation espoused in much of my work. I decided to take some time out from publishing for study and reflection, in order to see if I could find a new way forward in the field of management. That began a decade-long intellectual journey from which I concluded that today's managerial capitalism has reached the limits of its adaptive range. Instead of being the engine of wealth creation, it has become the obstacle to wealth creation. The society of the twenty-first century requires a new approach to capitalism that I call "distributed capitalism".
These last ten years of study, research, and reconceptualization are summarized in my new book The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with Jim Maxmin (my husband, a former CEO, a philosophy Ph.D., and the smartest man I know) and published by Viking in October 2002. The book argues that people have changed more than the corporations upon which their well-being -- as consumers and as employees-- depends. The chasm that now separates the new individuals from the old organizations is filled with frustration, pain, even outrage. Paradoxically, it also represents the opportunity to unleash the next great wave of wealth creation as we forge a new approach to commerce and to capitalism suited to today's people--our needs and dreams. I argue that there are neither easy fixes nor radical fixes for how out of touch business has become. There are only discontinuous solutions, which are difficult to think about, but once you do--they change your thinking forever. The book connects many disparate phenomena--things that we all know and experience but whose meaning and interrelationships have been opaque. After my two children, I am most proud of this book. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to bring these ideas to a wider public with a new monthly column on the future of business and society that will appear in Fast Company."