Abstract
Covid-19 has disrupted global markets, accelerated the digital transformation of frontline service, and changed how service organisations, frontline service employees, and consumers interact. This article explores how digitalisation is changing retail service work from a postdigital perspective. The article draws on an ethnography of salespeople’s service encounters in speciality chain stores between July 2015 and August 2021. Using a practice theory framework (the theory of practice architectures), the article explores what conditions form salespeople’s service encounters in connected stores and how retail organisations’ digitalisation of frontline service changes salespeople’s practice of service encounters. The contributions of this article to the ongoing debate over the digitalisation of service work are twofold. On the theoretical plane, the article provides an alternative framework to labour process theory for exploring and describing service work organised around digital technologies. Secondly, it uncovers the conditions that are changing salespeople’s practice of service encounters, along with attributes associated with service work and emotional labour skills. The research shows that the connected service encounter is characterised by postdigital dialogue that involves new roles and skills in frontline service work. Overall, the findings contribute to a better understanding of how digitalisation changes action and interaction in service encounters from an employee perspective.
Highlights
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted global markets; changed how service organisations, frontline service employees (FSEs), and consumers interact; catalysed the digitalisation of frontline service; and showed that FSEs’ role in the1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Postdigital Science and Education service encounter may change overnight (Faraj et al 2021; Voorhees et al 2020)
The blue circles and lines demonstrate how salespeople and customers are human actors in the retail chain organisation’s service systems, which are structured around digital technologies, multi-actor service systems, and networks with multiple service providers (Bowen 2016; De Keyser et al 2019; Larivière et al 2017)
Bowen 2016; De Keyser et al 2019; Evans and Kitchin 2018; Larivière et al 2017). These findings indicate that the postdigital dialogue evolving in connected service encounters requires additional skills beyond the emotional labour and customer service that has hitherto characterised service work (e.g., Casaca 2012; Groth et al 2019)
Summary
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted global markets; changed how service organisations, frontline service employees (FSEs), and consumers interact; catalysed the digitalisation of frontline service; and showed that FSEs’ role in the1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Postdigital Science and Education service encounter may change overnight (Faraj et al 2021; Voorhees et al 2020). This article responds to calls for research on the ‘forgotten frontline’ (i.e., retail, hospitality, and personal service employees) and FSEs’ changing roles as organisations digitalise their frontline service offering (De Keyser et al 2019; Subramony et al 2021; Voorhees et al 2020). It explores how digitalisation changes retail service work from a postdigital perspective. While a postdigital perspective on service work certainly reflects an attempt to understand what is novel about FSEs’ relationships with the digital in service encounters, it is about recognising how digital technologies are already embedded in and entangled with their existing service encounter practices and economic and political systems (Knox 2019)
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