Zuboff is the author of the books In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with James Maxmin.

[3] Zuboff's 1988 book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, is a study of information technology in the workplace.

The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002), co-authored with James Maxmin, is the product of multi-disciplinary research integrating history, sociology, management, and economics.

Writing before the advent of smartphones and widespread Internet access, Zuboff and Maxmin argue that wealth creation in an individualized society would require leveraging new digital capabilities to enable a "distributed capitalism".

This would entail a shift away from a primary focus on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, central control, and anonymous transactions in "organization-space" towards support-oriented relationships in "individual-space" with products and services configured and distributed to meet individualized wants and needs.

[12] Zuboff's work explores a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation that she termed "surveillance capitalism".

She first presented her concept in a 2014 essay, "A Digital Declaration", published in German and English in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

[16] Many issues that plague contemporary society including the assault on privacy and the so-called "privacy paradox", behavioral targeting, fake news, ubiquitous tracking, legislative and regulatory failure, algorithmic governance, social media addiction, abrogation of human rights, democratic destabilization, and more are reinterpreted and explained through the lens of surveillance capitalism's economic and social imperatives.

[21] From 2013 to 2016, Zuboff was a frequent contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), where essays drawn from her emerging work on surveillance capitalism were published in German and English.

[22][23][24] In 2019, Zuboff further developed her critique of the social, political and economic impacts of digital technologies in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.