Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...

 (retired). She was born in 1951 and is an American citizen. One of the first tenured women at the Harvard Business School, she earned her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University and her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

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In the Age of the Smart Machine

Author of the celebrated classic In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988). This book won instant critical acclaim in both the academic and trade press—including the front page review in the New York Times Book Review-- and is now considered the definitive study of information technology

Information technology

Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

 in the workplace. Of particular interest, this book introduced the concept of Informating

Informating

Informating is a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff in her book "In the Age of the Smart Machine" . It is the process that translates descriptions and measurements of activities, events and objects into information. By doing so, these activities become visible to the organization.Informating has both...

, the process that translates descriptions and measurements of activities, events and objects into information

Information

Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...

. By doing so, these activities become visible to the organization at all levels. As a result, Informating has both an empowering and oppressing influence.

ODYSSEY

In 1993, Professor Zuboff founded the executive education program “Odyssey: School for the Second Half of Life” at the Harvard Business School – which she led for the next 10 years. The program addressed the issues of transformation and career renewal at midlife.

The Support Economy

At the same time as running ODYSSEY, Professor Zuboff began to question the vision of the progressive corporation espoused in most management literature, including her earlier work. She took time out from teaching and publishing for a prolonged period of study and reflection. That began a decade-long intellectual journey from which she concluded that today's business models based on twentieth century “managerial capitalism” have reached the limits of their adaptive range. Once the engines of wealth creation, they have 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, co-authored with her husband, former Chief Executive of Laura Ashley

Laura Ashley

Laura Ashley was a Welsh fashion designer and businesswoman. She became a household name on the strength of her work as a designer and manufacturer of a range of colourful fabrics for clothes and home furnishings....

, Jim Maxmin, and published by Viking.

Zuboff lives with husband Maxmin and their two children on a fresh water farm in mid-coast Maine

Maine

Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...

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