Evans, Leighton and Kitchin, Rob (2018) A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control and modern retail stores. New Technology, Work and Employment, 33 (1). pp. 44-57. ISSN 1468-005X

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The research for this paper was provided by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, ‘The Programmable City’ (ERC-2012-AdG-323636).
Keywords:	retail; control; discipline; code/space; labour; big data; automation;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > National Institute for Regional and Spatial analysis, NIRSA
Item ID:	13134
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12107
Depositing User:	Prof. Rob Kitchin
Date Deposited:	22 Jul 2020 14:28
Journal or Publication Title:	New Technology, Work and Employment
Publisher:	John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Refereed:	Yes
Funders:	European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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