Evans, Leighton and Kitchin, Rob
(2017)
A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control, and modern retail stores: The Programmable City Working Paper 34.
Working Paper.
The Programmable City Working Paper.
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 superstore 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 acts 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 code/space and governmentality desired.
| Item Type: |
Monograph
(Working Paper)
|
| Additional Information: |
Published as an open access pre-print on SocArXiv: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/z9dgc. Published under a CC-By Attribution 4.0 International License. The research funding for this paper was provided by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, ‘The Programmable City’ (ERC-2012-AdG-323636). |
| Keywords: |
retail; work; big data; code/space; governmentality; discipline; control; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > National Institute for Regional and Spatial analysis, NIRSA |
| Item ID: |
9239 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Z9DGC |
| Depositing User: |
Prof. Rob Kitchin
|
| Date Deposited: |
09 Feb 2018 17:03 |
| Publisher: |
The Programmable City Working Paper |
| Funders: |
European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award |
| URI: |
|
| 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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