Pseudo-Automation: How Labor-Offsetting Technologies Reconfigure Roles and Relationships in Frontline Retail Work
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| _version_ | 1866912206307721216 |
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| author | Moradi, Pegah Levy, Karen Cheyre, Cristobal |
| author_facet | Moradi, Pegah Levy, Karen Cheyre, Cristobal |
| contents | Self-service machines are a form of pseudo-automation; rather than actually automate tasks, they offset them to unpaid customers. Typically implemented for customer convenience and to reduce labor costs, self-service is often criticized for worsening customer service and increasing loss and theft for retailers. Though millions of frontline service workers continue to interact with these technologies on a day-to-day basis, little is known about how these machines change the nature of frontline labor. Through interviews with current and former cashiers who work with self-checkout technologies, we investigate how technology that offsets labor from an employee to a customer can reconfigure frontline work. We find three changes to cashiering tasks as a result of self-checkout: (1) Working at self-checkout involved parallel demands from multiple customers, (2) self-checkout work was more problem-oriented (including monitoring and policing customers), and (3) traditional checkout began to become more demanding as easier transactions were filtered to self-checkout. As their interactions with customers became more focused on problem solving and rule enforcement, cashiers were often positioned as adversaries to customers at self-checkout. To cope with perceived adversarialism, cashiers engaged in a form of relational patchwork, using techniques like scapegoating the self-checkout machine and providing excessive customer service in order to maintain positive customer interactions in the face of potential conflict. Our findings highlight how even under pseudo-automation, workers must engage in relational work to manage and mend negative human-to-human interactions so that machines can be properly implemented in context. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_02888 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Pseudo-Automation: How Labor-Offsetting Technologies Reconfigure Roles and Relationships in Frontline Retail Work Moradi, Pegah Levy, Karen Cheyre, Cristobal Human-Computer Interaction Computers and Society Self-service machines are a form of pseudo-automation; rather than actually automate tasks, they offset them to unpaid customers. Typically implemented for customer convenience and to reduce labor costs, self-service is often criticized for worsening customer service and increasing loss and theft for retailers. Though millions of frontline service workers continue to interact with these technologies on a day-to-day basis, little is known about how these machines change the nature of frontline labor. Through interviews with current and former cashiers who work with self-checkout technologies, we investigate how technology that offsets labor from an employee to a customer can reconfigure frontline work. We find three changes to cashiering tasks as a result of self-checkout: (1) Working at self-checkout involved parallel demands from multiple customers, (2) self-checkout work was more problem-oriented (including monitoring and policing customers), and (3) traditional checkout began to become more demanding as easier transactions were filtered to self-checkout. As their interactions with customers became more focused on problem solving and rule enforcement, cashiers were often positioned as adversaries to customers at self-checkout. To cope with perceived adversarialism, cashiers engaged in a form of relational patchwork, using techniques like scapegoating the self-checkout machine and providing excessive customer service in order to maintain positive customer interactions in the face of potential conflict. Our findings highlight how even under pseudo-automation, workers must engage in relational work to manage and mend negative human-to-human interactions so that machines can be properly implemented in context. |
| title | Pseudo-Automation: How Labor-Offsetting Technologies Reconfigure Roles and Relationships in Frontline Retail Work |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction Computers and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02888 |