Surveillance Capitalism

Debating Capitalism

This paper is about the dissemination of knowledge across the curriculum and the role business education can play in elevating student awareness and understanding of interdisciplinary thoughts. Most importantly, it explores the importance of thoughtful appreciation of divergent educational paradigms and how such an appreciation can be the bridge toward cohesive, contemporary, and meaningful lea...

Why Capitalism?

Corporate Privacy Policy Changes during PRISM and the Rise of Surveillance Capitalism

Disclosure of the NSA’s PRISM program demonstrated that Internet companies have become prime targets of government surveillance. But what role do companies themselves play in putting users’ privacy at risk? By comparing the changes in the privacy policies of ten companies—the nine in PRISM plus Twitter—I seek to understand how users’ privacy shifted. Specifically, I study how company practices ...

Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four...

Capitalism in Question

Paul Adler was Program Chair for the 2013 meeting of the Academy of Management in Orlando, Florida, in August. In this capacity, he organized the “All-Academy Theme” component of the meeting program, helped by a committee of Tom Kochan (MIT), Jerry Davis (U. Michigan), Carrie Leana (U. Pittsburgh), and Stella Nkomo (U. Pretoria). The theme was “Capitalism in Question.” The essay below is an edi...