Shoshana Zuboff | |
|---|---|
 Zuboff in 2019 | |
| Born | (1951-11-18)November 18, 1951 (age 74) |
| Title | Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita Harvard Business School |
| Spouse | Jim Maxmin (died 2016) |
| Children | 2, includingChloe Maxmin |
| Awards | 2019Axel Springer Award, 2024McGill University Faculty of EngineeringHonorary Degree |
| Academic background | |
| Education | University of Chicago (BA) Harvard University (PhD) |
| Thesis | The Ego at Work (1980) |
| Doctoral advisor | Herbert Kelman |
| Influences | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Social psychology,information systems |
| Sub-discipline |
|
| Institutions | Harvard Business School |
| Notable ideas | Surveillance capitalism |
| Website | shoshanazuboff |
Shoshana Zuboff (born November 18, 1951)[2] is an American author, professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar. She is a professor emerita atHarvard Business School.
Zuboff is the author of the booksIn the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power andThe 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: theDigital Revolution, the evolution ofcapitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human development.[2]
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 ofbehavior modification", "information civilization", "computer-mediated work", the "automate/informate" dialectic, "abstraction of work", "individualization of consumption" and the "coup from above".
Zuboff is a trustee of5Rights Foundation,[3] an organisation founded byBaroness Beeban Kidron to promote the rights of children online.
Zuboff was born inNew England but spent much of her childhood inArgentina.[2] She received her B.A. in philosophy from theUniversity of Chicago, and herPhD insocial psychology fromHarvard University.[4] Zuboff is Jewish.[5][6][7]
Zuboff was married to businessman and academic James Maxmin until his death in 2016. They co-wrote two books together, and lived inNobleboro, Maine. They had a son, Jake, and a daughter,Chloe, who is a former state legislator in Maine.[8]
Zuboff joinedHarvard Business School in 1981 where she became theCharles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and one of the firsttenured women on the HBS faculty. In 2014 and 2015 she was a Faculty Associate at theBerkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at theHarvard Law School.[4]
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.[9][10][11][12]
Major concepts introduced in this book relate to knowledge, authority, and power in the information workplace. These include the duality of information technology as aninformating 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: 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 oneconomies 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.[13]
Zuboff's work explores a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation that she termed "surveillance capitalism". She first presented her concept in a 2014 essay, "A Digital Declaration", published in German and English in theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.[14] Her followup 2015 scholarly article in theJournal of Information Technology titled "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization"[15] received the International Conference on Information Systems Scholars' 2016 Best Paper Award.[16]
Surveillance capitalism and its consequences for twenty-first century society are most fully theorized in her bookThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. She summarizes it thus: "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."[17]
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."[18]
Zuboff's scholarship on surveillance capitalism as a "rogue mutation of capitalism" has become a primary framework for understandingbig data and the larger field of commercial surveillance that she describes as a "surveillance-based economic order". She argues that neitherprivacy norantitrust laws provide adequate protection from the unprecedented practices of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as an economic and social logic. Her book originated the concept of "instrumentarian power", in comparison to traditionaltotalitarian power. Instrumentarian power is a consequence of surveillance capitalist operations which threaten individual autonomy and democracy. As the driving force behind it, she identifiescapital accumulation, without being confined to market capitalism.[17]
Many issues that plague contemporary society including the assault on privacy and the so-called "privacy paradox", behavioral targeting,fake news, ubiquitous tracking, legislative and regulatory failure,algorithmic governance,social media addiction, abrogation of human rights, democratic destabilization, and more are reinterpreted and explained through the lens of surveillance capitalism's economic and social imperatives. Her work is an influential source for theHuman-Centered Artificial Intelligence community.
In 1993, Zuboff founded the executive education program "Odyssey: School for the Second Half of Life" at the Harvard Business School. The program addressed the issues of transformation and career renewal at midlife. During twelve years of her teaching and leadership, Odyssey became known as the premier program of its kind in the world.[19][20]
In addition to her academic work, Zuboff brought her ideas to many commercial and public/private ventures through her public speaking as well as her direct involvement in key projects, particularly in social housing, health care, education, and elder care.
Zuboff also became a business columnist, developing and disseminating new concepts fromThe Support Economy. From 2003 to 2005, Zuboff published her ideas in her monthly column "Evolving", published in the magazineFast Company.[21] From 2007 through 2009, she was a featured columnist forBusiness Week.[22]
From 2013 to 2016, Zuboff was a frequent contributor to theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), where essays drawn from her emerging work onsurveillance capitalism were published in German and English.[23][24][25] In 2019, Zuboff further developed her critique of the social, political and economic impacts of digital technologies inThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism.[26]
On September 25, 2020, Zuboff was named as one of the 25 members of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent monitoring group over Facebook.[27]
Zuboff was the recipient of the 2019Axel Springer Award.[28]
In 2024, she was awarded anHonorary degree from theMcGill University Faculty of Engineering.[29]
Media related toShoshana Zuboff at Wikimedia Commons