Workers logged onto the unit, giving their employee ID number, using voice commands. After clocking into a shift, an order filler would first get their “unit.” This was a wireless mini-computer, which hooked into a belt about the waist and plugged into a headset. We examined order fillers, the modal group of workers. First, let me explain the physically demanding, isolating, and repetitive nature of the work. What kind of workplace culture can develop in such a context? Our study attempts to answer that question. These pressures have created a strong impetus toward using information technology to make warehouse work more efficient. Offering a wide array of products - and an increasingly sophisticated customer base - creates a tremendous challenge to get the right product to the right store at the right time. Along with the growth of discount stores and “Big Box” companies, the logistical pressures increased for distributors. Following the “logistics revolution” of the late 1980’s (Bonacich and Wilson 2008) - underpinned primarily by containerisation and the UPC code - grocery stores began offering more and more products on their shelves. Let us consider the case of warehouse work, particularly in grocery distribution. As computers become better at “thinking,” or using algorithms to make decisions - a phenomena which, once networked with systems of memory, is not all that different from human cognition - more and more types of work have the potential to become “computer controlled.” What can that mean for the human beings controlled by computers? When we are considering something as fundamental as information -the cornerstone for any cognitive processing of reality - we should broaden our thinking just a bit. They tend to presume a time frame of only a few hundred years. The above arguments assume a rather narrow understanding of the potential for technology to shape human behaviour. Should we expect a different pattern with information technology? Perhaps. These contradictory examples have long been a source of ammunition for those who wish to argue the effects of technological change on workplaces are largely neutral. When radiology was being developed, doctors would sometimes defer to the expertise of technicians running machines to make a diagnosis. However, new technology can also subvert workplace hierarchy. In many cases, such as with Ford’s assembly line, workers came under greater control. Ever since centralised power changed the organisation of textile mills - closing down a system of making clothes small batch in the home, but paving the way for management to become a profession - we have seen this pattern.Ī similar pattern of “some good, some bad” may be seen with managerial control. However, new skills were needed to control those machines. Once numerically controlled machines were developed, these skills were no longer necessary (Shaiken). Metal tools used to be made by hand, using a machine called a lathe. How does technological progress affect workers? Many argue that there are some positives and some negatives, and that they cancel each other out for a largely neutral effect. Each day of the four-year observation period, half a million cases moved through the facility, yet the 200 workers could, if they chose, go the entire shift barely speaking a word to one another. In March of 2016, I, along with my advisor published an ethnographic account of working there ( Elliott and Long 2016). That is what megastores, usually shaped like square or rectangular boxes, are called. I hired into a “ Big Box” warehouse in the summer of 2006.
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