Year: 2018
Type: article
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.
DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12107
Authors: Leighton Evans, Rob Kitchin
Institutions: Swansea University, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Language: English
Topic: Legal and Labor Studies
Subfield: Industrial relations
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funders: Home Office, European Research Council
Award: G640017776
OpenAlex ID: W2785665207