肖莎娜·祖博夫

Shoshana Zuboff (born November 18, 1951) is an American author, professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar. She is a professor emerita at Harvard Business School.

Zuboff is the author of the books In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with James Maxmin. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, integrates core themes of her research: the Digital Revolution, the evolution of capitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human development.

Zuboff's work is the source of many original concepts including "surveillance capitalism", "instrumentarian power", the "division of learning in society", "economies of action", the "means of behavior modification", "information civilization", "computer-mediated work", the "automate/informate" dialectic, "abstraction of work", "individualization of consumption" and the "coup from above".

Background and education

Zuboff was born in New England but spent much of her childhood in Argentina. She received her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, and her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University.

Zuboff was married to businessman and academic James Maxmin until his death in 2016. They co-wrote two books together, and lived in Nobleboro, Maine. They had a son, Jake, and a daughter, Chloe, who is a former state legislator in Maine.

Career

Zuboff joined Harvard Business School in 1981 where she became the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and one of the first tenured women on the HBS faculty. In 2014 and 2015 she was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

Writings and research

In the Age of the Smart Machine

Zuboff's 1988 book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, is a study of information technology in the workplace.

Major concepts introduced in this book relate to knowledge, authority, and power in the information workplace. These include the duality of information technology as an informating and an automating technology; the abstraction of work associated with information technology and its related intellectual skill demands; computer-mediated work; the "information panopticon"; information technology as a challenge to managerial authority and command/control; the social construction of technology; the shift from a division of labor to a division of learning; and the inherently collaborative patterns of information work, among others.

The Support Economy

The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002), co-authored with James Maxmin, is the product of multi-disciplinary research integrating history, sociology, management, and economics. It argues that the new structure of demand associated with the "individuation of consumption" had produced widespread institutional failures in every domain, including a growing divide between the individuals and the commercial organizations upon which they depend.

Writing before the advent of smartphones and widespread Internet access, Zuboff and Maxmin argue that wealth creation in an individualized society would require leveraging new digital capabilities to enable a "distributed capitalism". This would entail a shift away from a primary focus on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, central control, and anonymous transactions in "organization-space" towards support-oriented relationships in "individual-space" with products and services configured and distributed to meet individualized wants and needs.

Surveillance Capitalism

Zuboff's work explores a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation that she terms "surveillance capitalism". She first presented her concept in a 2014 essay, "A Digital Declaration", published in German and English in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her follow-up 2015 scholarly article in the Journal of Information Technology titled "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization" received the International Conference on Information Systems Scholars' 2016 Best Paper Award.

Surveillance capitalism and its consequences for twenty-first century society are most fully theorized in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. She summarizes it thusly: "Surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people's sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift towards democratic de-consolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies."

The "epistemic coup" (i.e., the coup enacted by tech corporations to claim ownership of knowledge in society) is summarized as follows:

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge—how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern.

This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.