A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control and modern retail stores

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12107

44 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 33:1

ISSN 1468-005X

A smart place to work? Big data systems,

labour, control and modern retail stores

Leighton Evans and Rob Kitchin

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 gover-

nance 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 con-

tinual 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.

Keywords: retail, control, discipline, code/space, labour, big

data, automation.

Introduction

There used to be more chance for contact and more time with customers. Now, do people care

enough?

(Customer Services Operative).

The retail industry has to balance good customer service and soft labour skills with

efficiency, maximising revenue and formal labour. In large retail stores, interaction

with customers and the skills of selling sit parallel to highly automated stock control

processes, supply chain integration and automated resource planning. In addition, the

staff in such environments have their labour translated into data through a variety of

techniques. For workers who have spent a long time in retail, such as the customer

services operative quoted above (13 years), the increasing use of systems of control

that utilise big data stand in stark contrast with regimes that they started their careers

with that used less intense, more disciplinary forms of governance. This paper ex-

plores the changing conditions of work and workplaces in the age of big data in the

retail sector. The introduction of new computational systems into retail operations

Leighton Evans (L.Evans@swansea.ac.uk), is a Senior Lecturer in Media Theory at Swansea University,

Wales. He is a Media Theorist with research interests in digital culture, social media, phenomenology,

virtual reality and the mediation of work by digital media.

Rob Kitchin, is a Professor and ERC Advanced Investigator at the National Institute of Regional and

Spatial Analysis, Maynooth University, Ireland. Rob’s research interests are in software, big data, smart

cities, the internet and cyberspace and data infrastructures and practices.