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 termed "
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 followup 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 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." 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." Zuboff's scholarship on surveillance capitalism as a "rogue mutation of capitalism" has become a primary framework for understanding
big data and the larger field of commercial surveillance that she describes as a "surveillance-based economic order". She argues that neither
privacy nor
antitrust 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 traditional
totalitarian power. Instrumentarian power is a consequence of surveillance capitalist operations which threaten individual autonomy and democracy. As the driving force behind it, she identifies
capital accumulation, without being confined to market capitalism. 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 the
Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence community. == Other activities ==