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- Title
A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control and modern retail stores.
- Authors
Evans, Leighton; Kitchin, Rob
- 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.
- Publication
New Technology, Work & Employment, 2018, Vol 33, Issue 1, p44
- ISSN
0268-1072
- Publication type
Academic Journal
- DOI
10.1111/ntwe.12107