More than ten years after “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” first named surveillance capitalism as a new form of economic and social power, the questions Shoshana Zuboff posed about knowledge, authority, autonomy, and democracy have only become more consequential.
Shoshana Zuboff, co-director of the Technology & Human Rights Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights and Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, has received a 2026 Sage 10-Year Impact Award for her groundbreaking article, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.”
The annual awards recognize research published in Sage journals that has demonstrated exceptional and lasting influence over the decade since publication. Zuboff’s article, published in the Journal of Information Technology in 2015, has received more than 2,300 scholarly citations and more than 120 policy citations, making it one of three papers recognized by Sage with this year’s award.
Published at a moment when the implications of the rapidly expanding digital economy were only beginning to come into focus, “Big Other” introduced and developed Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism: a new economic logic built around the extraction and analysis of data generated through human experience and behavior. The article examined how these practices were creating unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power and raised fundamental questions about their consequences for individuals and society.
Those ideas would become the foundation for Zuboff’s landmark 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which brought the concept to a global audience and established a vocabulary for understanding the relationship between digital technologies, economic power, human autonomy, and democracy.
The Sage award recognizes not simply the reach of a single article, but the continuing influence of a body of scholarship that has transformed how researchers, policymakers, advocates, and the public understand power in the digital age.
At the Carr-Ryan Center, Zuboff continues to advance these questions in her role as co-director of the Technology & Human Rights Fellowship, with Center Faculty Director Mathias Risse. The fellowship brings together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines and sectors to examine the challenges that technological change poses to the human rights framework.
Of his co-director, Risse says, “Shoshana Zuboff has long been a remarkably prescient voice, drawing attention to the dangers of Big Tech shaping humanity's future. Her work on surveillance capitalism captures some of the essential themes of our current economic and political reality, and today's acceleration in AI makes her insights even more urgent.”
The fellowship program’s central research theme—“Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy: Who Knows, Who Decides?”—builds directly on Zuboff’s scholarship, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and her 2022 article, “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization,” alongside Risse’s 2023 book, Political Theory of the Digital Age.
“Shoshana Zuboff has long been a remarkably prescient voice, drawing attention to the dangers of Big Tech shaping humanity's future. —Mathias Risse
In her 2022 article, Zuboff extends the analysis she began in “Big Other,” examining surveillance capitalism not simply as a business model but as an institutional order whose concentrations of knowledge and power pose profound questions for democratic governance. Her work asks who has the authority to know, who has the power to decide, and what institutions are necessary to ensure that the digital future remains compatible with human freedom and democratic self-government.
Those questions have become increasingly urgent as artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies reshape institutions, economies, and everyday life. They also sit at the heart of the Carr-Ryan Center’s Technology & Human Rights Program, which examines how technological power is changing the landscape in which human rights must be understood and protected.
Through the fellowship, Zuboff and Risse are helping a new generation of researchers and practitioners build on these questions, connecting scholarship on technological power with emerging challenges in human rights, public policy, law, and democratic governance.
“For the third year in a row now, the fellowship has brought together dedicated and talented practitioners and theorists from around the world who seek to advance our understanding of the realities of surveillance capitalism and related themes,” says Risse. “It’s been a honor running this fellowship together with Shoshana Zuboff.”
The 10-Year Impact Award offers a measure of the extraordinary reach of Zuboff’s ideas over the past decade. It also underscores their continuing relevance. More than ten years after “Big Other:Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” first named surveillance capitalism as a new form of economic and social power, the questions Zuboff posed about knowledge, authority, autonomy, and democracy have only become more consequential.
At the Carr-Ryan Center, Zuboff’s pioneering work continues to inspire and animate the understanding of emerging forms of technological power and helps ensure that the future they shape is grounded in human rights and democratic values.
Kyle Faneuff | Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights
