Shoshana Zuboff - The Support Economy - Overview

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. Each new logic calls forth different approaches to capitalism and wealth creation. By the end of the twentieth century societies, particularly, but not exclusively, in the West, had produced a new experience of individuality. This was the result of both the diminished role of traditional identity sources (kinship, region, race, gender) and the sharp rise in education and in the general 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 old information asymmetries upon which "caveat emptor" had always been based. The informating process, once confined to the workplace, had overflowed into the marketplace with, according to Zuboff and Maxmin, even more dramatic consequences for the evolution of capitalism.

The Support Economydescribes individual identity as characterized by both the objective requirement and the psychological experience of self-determination. As such, psychological self-determination has become the basis for a fundamental shift in the underlying structure of consumption from the mass to the individual. Zuboff 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”. Zuboff 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 on a global scale as new principles of distributed capitalism combine with new distributed technologies to meet these new demands. Her 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 difficult, if not impossible, to suppress.