Shoshana Zuboff
| Shoshana Zuboff | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1951 |
| Known for | Informating |
Shoshana Zuboff (born 1951) is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (retired). 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.
The concept of computer-mediated work was first introduced by Shoshana Zuboff in a 1981 MIT Working Paper, “Psychological and Organizational Implications of Computer-Mediated Work”, elaborated in a 1982 article, “New Worlds of Computer-Mediated Work”, and brought to full expression in the 1988 book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.
Zuboff’s research consisted of in-depth multi-year studies of office, factory, professional, executive, and craft workplaces all characterized by a recent shift from traditional to computer-mediated task environments. The research demonstrated the tripartite nature of the relationship between information technology and work: 1) technology is not neutral, but embodies intrinsic characteristics that enable new human experiences and foreclose others, 2) within these new “horizons of the possible” individuals and groups construct meaning and make choices, further shaping the situation, and 3) the interplay of intrinsic qualities and human choices is further shaped by social, political, and economic interests that inscribe the situation with their own intended and unintended opportunities and limitations.
Professor Zuboff has been called “the true prophet of the information age”. Her much celebrated classic In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) won instant critical acclaim in both the academic and trade press—including the front page of the New York Times Book Review—and has long been considered the classic study of information technology in the workplace.
In the Age of the Smart Machine is the source of many concepts that have become widely integrated into the understanding of information technologies and their consequences. These include the findings that information technology related change is biased toward higher skill levels; that high levels of information technology can pave the way for more fluid, social, distributed, and less hierarchical work arrangements; the concept of the “information panopticon”; the duality of information technology as an informating and an automating technology; the abstraction of work; computer-mediated work; information as a challenge to authority; the need for upgraded intellective skills in the informated workplace; and the fact that individuals and groups create the meaning of the information they use —to name but a few. According to Finnish scholars Hanna Timonen and Kaija-Stiina Paloheimo’s 2008 analysis of the emergence and diffusion of the concept of knowledge work, In the Age of the Smart Machine is one of three late twentieth century books, including Peter Drucker’s In the Age of Discontinuity and Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, that are responsible for the diffusion of the concept of “knowledge work.”
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