According to her account, by the mid-1990’s Shoshana had begun to question the vision of the progressive corporation espoused in most management literature. Observing the tendency of firms to utilize information technologies primarily for the limited purposes of automation, cost savings, and control, she began to explore new ways that the technology’s informating power might find its full expression. This led to time out from teaching and publishing for a period of study and reflection and began a decade-long intellectual journey from which she concluded that today’s business models, based on the frameworks of concentration and control associated with twentieth century “managerial capitalism,” had reached the limits of their adaptive range. Once the engines of wealth creation, they had turned into its impediments. The economies of the twenty-first century require 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. She co-authored the book with her husband, former Chief Executive Jim Maxmin, using his practical experience to ground many of her new theoretical formulations. The Support Economy was published by Viking Penguin in 2002.

OVERVIEW

According to The Conference Board, The Support Economy is “in part a history and critique of capitalism, an analysis of corporate function and organization, and a visionary statement of a new economic order. It is that vision that lifts the book from the pack, that will make it controversial, and that may, 50 years hence, be regarded as seminal.” As one of the first books of the last decade to challenge the reigning practices of western capitalism, The Support Economy anticipated many of the dynamics associated with the 2008-2009 financial meltdown. It chronicled the institutionalization of zero-sum adversarial conflicts between consumers and businesses that was a key factor in the failure of the sub-prime mortgage industry.

The book follows the shift from the era of the mass to the era of the individual. The argument reestablishes the evolution of business as an expression of the evolution of society, and specifically the evolution of consumption. Fundamentally new logics of consumption express the development of society and call forth different approaches to capitalism and wealth creation. By the end of the twentieth century societies, particularly though not exclusively in the West, had produced a new experience of individuality. This was the result of the diminished role of traditional identity sources (kinship, region, race, gender), the sharp rise in education, and  the increasing complexity of social experience. The book poses the question, “what is the new form of capitalism best suited to meet new individualized needs?” The question is heightened by the information technology revolution, which has helped to drive individuality and empower end consumers with vast amounts of new information, in many cases eliminating the information asymmetries upon which “caveat emptor” had always been based. The informating process, once confined to the workplace, overflowed into the marketplace with, according to Zuboff and Maxmin, even more dramatic consequences for the evolution of capitalism

The Support Economy describes a new era of psychological self-determination as the basis for a fundamental shift in the underlying structure of consumption from the mass to the individual. It argues that this shift initiates a transformation in the very nature of economic value. Today’s consumers have moved beyond mass produced goods and services to instead seek individualized relationships of advocacy and support that enable control over their lives and meaningful channels for voice, connection, and influence. The purpose of commerce becomes enabling individuals to live their lives as they choose, realizing the value propositions that arise from their unique perspectives in “individual space”.

The Support Economy argues that the chasm that has come to separate new people and old organizations is filled with frustration, pain, and mistrust, but that it has also laid the foundation for the next wave of wealth creation as new principles of distributed capitalism combine with new distributed technologies to meet these new human needs. The hypothesis is that whereas managerial prerogatives could suppress the impact of an informated workplace, the informated marketplace poses a more formidable challenge to managerial hegemony–one that is far more difficult to suppress.

NEW CONCEPTS AND DIFFUSION

The Support Economy introduced many new concepts to the management and social science lexicon including: distributed capitalism and distributed value; federated support networks; relationship economics; deep support; infrastructure convergence; collaborative coordination; relationship value vs. transaction value; organization space vs. individual space (I-space); the individuation of consumption; organizational narcissism; enterprise logic; value creation vs. value realization.

The book was selected by strategy+business as one of the top ten business books of 2003 and ranked number one in the “Values” category. BusinessWeek named it the “number one idea” in its special issue on “Twenty Five Ideas for a Changing World”. Inc. magazine described The Support Economy as “the new new thing” in its special anniversary issue on entrepreneurship.  The book has also been featured in many magazines and newspapers including The Economist, Fast Company, The Financial Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and Across the Board (The Conference Board) as well as in major publications in Germany, Finland, Italy, India, China, Brazil, Croatia, Japan, Canada, and South Korea.

Support economy principles have been the source of significant experimentation in a wide range of entrepreneurial businesses as well as in the education and health sectors.