Journal article 22363 views
A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control and modern retail stores
,
Rob Kitchin
New Technology, Work and Employment, Volume: 33, Issue: 1, Pages: 44 - 57
Swansea University Author:
Leighton Evans
Full text not available from this repository: check for access using links below.
DOI (Published version): 10.1111/ntwe.12107
Abstract
The modern retail store is a complex coded assemblage and data-intensive environment, its operations and management mediated by a number of interlinked big data systems. This paper draws on an ethnography of a retail store in Ireland to examine how these systems modulate the functioning of the store...
| Published in: | New Technology, Work and Employment |
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| ISSN: | 02681072 |
| Published: |
2018
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa39011 |
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| Abstract: |
The modern retail store is a complex coded assemblage and data-intensive environment, its operations and management mediated by a number of interlinked big data systems. This paper draws on an ethnography of a retail store in Ireland to examine how these systems modulate the functioning of the store and working practices of employees. It was found that retail work involves a continual movement between a governance regime of control reliant on big data systems which seek to regulate and harnesses formal labour and automation into enterprise planning, and a disciplinary regime that deals with the symbolic, interactive labour that workers perform and act as a reserve mode of governmentality if control fails. This continual movement is caused by new systems of control being open to vertical and horizontal fissures. While retail functions as a coded assemblage of control, systems are too brittle to sustain the governmentality desired. |
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| Keywords: |
retail, control, discipline, code/space, labour, big data, automation. |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Issue: |
1 |
| Start Page: |
44 |
| End Page: |
57 |