Digitalisation, gender and the future of work in retail

Abstract

This thesis examines how frontline supermarket workers experience digitalisation, and the ways in which the process of digitalisation is gendered. It found that frontline employees experience digitalisation in relation to four key themes: speed and work intensity, skills and valuation, surveillance and control, and job security and precarity. Gender was found to have an association with digitalisation at the industry level and in organisational practices, though there were few individual differences between men and women’s reported experiences of technological change in supermarket work. Such findings point to the need to examine gender power dynamics at multiple levels, demonstrating that gender is an important factor in employee experiences of digitalisation due to the continuing existence of gender inequality and segregation. Empirically, the thesis makes a contribution by applying labour process theory to the novel concern of digitalisation in post-pandemic contemporary frontline retail work and examining the role of gender in employee experiences of digitalisation. Theoretically, this thesis contributes to labour process scholarship on gender at work through its use of a multilevel conceptualisation of gender as a social structure.