Shoshana Zuboff - Recent Work

Recent Work

In addition to her academic work, Zuboff and Maxmin brought their ideas to many commercial and public/private ventures in the US and UK, particularly in social housing, health care, education, and elder care. Zuboff became a popular business columnist. Most of her columns developed and disseminated new concepts from The Support Economy. From 2003 to 2005, Zuboff shared her ideas in her popular monthly column “Evolving”, in the magazine Fast Company. From 2007 through 2009 she was a featured columnist for BusinessWeek.com.

In 2009, shortly after her retirement from the Harvard Business School, Zuboff was completing the sequel to The Support Economy along with a book on the ODYSSEY program, when she was struck by lightning in her home in Maine, which then burned to the ground destroying her work along with the entire structure and contents of the family home. Aspects of this experience are described in her Huffington Post essay, “When Global Warming Ate My Life” . In that essay she also introduced the concept of "the error of predictability.".

A new publication in 2010, “Creating Value in the Age of Distributed Capitalism,” appears in the McKinsey Quarterly. This article uses accessible examples to further develop the concepts of distributed capitalism, the institutional bypass, and the federated support network. It clarifies and moves beyond some of her concepts in The Support Economy. It uses an evolutionary metaphor to introduce the contrast between innovation and mutation and describes the new " IRBRS genome" of distributed capitalism based on the functions of inverting practices from organization space to individual space; rescuing assets from legacy systems/institutions; bypassing sclerotic institutional boundaries; reconfiguring assets around individuals; and providing tools and platforms for ongoing support. It describes the characteristics of successful mutations under distributed capitalism. It provides a compelling example of achieving high quality self determining elder care at a small percentage of the cost of the traditional concentrated (and all too frequently adversarial) model.