The Support Economy: re-inventing capitalism? - public lecture

29 April 2003

Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor at the Harvard Business School, USA
Jim Maxmin, former CEO of Volvo-UK, Thorn Home Electronics and Laura Ashley PLC

 ‘Is it time for a new capitalism?’: managerial capitalism has outlived the mass society it was once designed to serve. It cannot meet the needs of today's people. Its business models are bankrupt. The chasm that now separates individuals and organisations is marked by frustration, mistrust, disappointment, and even rage.

But that chasm also represents the opportunity to forge a new ‘distributed capitalism’ for a post-modern society and thus ignite a new wave of wealth creation in the 21st century. Capitalism has periodically reinvented itself through a recalibration to consumers' changing conceptions of ‘the good life’. The conditions are ripening for precisely this kind of reinvention today. But the reinvention process is likely to look less like an organisational programme and more like a social movement. Can we invent a capitalism truly suited to our times?

Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin will discuss these and other themes from their new book The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism.

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