Times and Rhythms of Working with Customers. Alienation and Immediatization Processes in the Shopping Streets of Milan and London

In the last 20 years, Western countries have passed through a process of deindustrialization: in many European metropolitan cities the capitalism of the Factory System is over. The automatization earlier and the phenomenon of delocalization later, have caused the expulsion of a lot of blue-collar workers from the productive system. We can observe in parallel the growth of employment in the tertiary sector, often in metropolitan cities in the retail activity, and often with low wage, precarious and low skilled jobs (Bauman 1998, Gallino 2001, Fellini 2017). The number of shopping centres and retail parks increase substantially also today, in Europe. Moreover, in recent years a process of deregulation of openings hours has begun: in many European cities there are stores and supermarkets open 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Sales assistants, work shifts, work on Sundays and on holidays, they have not a structured week or structured and recursive social times. However, the whole social life, especially in urban contexts, and not only the retail workers' everyday life, is influenced by the liberalization of shops opening hours and the changing times, in this case of consumptions (Adam 1994). We are witnessing the emerging of a social process that I called “immediatization”, a process together of acceleration (Rosa 2003, 2007, 2010, Wajcman 2015), de-routinization and de-structuration of the social life (Giddens 1979, 1984, 1999). The research investigates this phenomenon from the point of view of retail shift workers, observing their perceptions and representations, the influences on their everyday life and their time. Two case studies (Stake 1994) were chosen, two shopping streets in two European cities characterized by a strong service-oriented economy: Corso Buenos Aires in Milan and Oxford Street in London. Qualitative methods were used: six months of ethnographic observation in each case study, comprehensively 50 semi-structured interviews with photo-elicitation, two focus groups with photo-elicitation and documentary analysis. The rich empirical material collected was analysed and codified through a CAQDAS, Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software, MaxQDA. The research findings are very interesting: retail shift workers perceive a condition of “time alienation”, they feel that they have not power over their own time and this situation creates a context of anxiety, stress and pressure. The most alienated are the women, besides the problems in their work/life balance in particular if they have children, almost all the adult and young adult female shift workers interviewed perceive a sort of “lack of recognition” in their relationships with customers that conditions their confidence, their self-assurance, and their everyday life also outside their workplaces. This situation is linked both with the “commercialization of human feeling” (Hochschild 2003) and with the condition of “time alienation” caused by de-structured working and social times. The author argued that the classical concept of alienation (Marx 1849) could unify the theoretical debate on the phenomena of consumerism (Marcuse 1964), precariousness (Sennett 1998) and social acceleration.