Search results

This paper aims to examine how instructional videos produced by retail employers and tech companies have modelled cashier roles and skills in service encounters over time, providing insights into cashier training and job responsibility evolution across different retail eras.

Online video research is used, with YouTube as data source and the theory of practice architectures and related concepts as analytical framework, to examine 50 instructional video narratives produced between 1917 and 2021.

Cashiers’ selling practice comprises transactions and customer service, which are often taught separately. Technology has explicitly influenced changes in cashier work and training at three points in history: mechanised checkout (1917), computerised checkout (1980) and connected checkout (2010). “New technology” involves a combination of arrangements with the potential to transform the semantic, physical and social dimensions of cashiers’ selling practice. However, despite technological advancements, employers’ cashier training videos have not evolved significantly since the 1990s and still focus on emotional labour skills.

The findings indicate a need for transforming training for service work in the connected service encounter.

The relationship between technological innovations and changes in frontline service work and workplace learning is examined through the lens of instructional videos produced by retail employers and tech companies, giving rise to insights into limitations of current training methods for service workers. This paper suggests the need for a more holistic perspective on service encounters to understand service work and workplace learning changes.

In this study, online in-service training for people employed in the food production industry is scrutinized. The purpose of this study is to analyse how the participants adapt to such online environments in terms of the kind of discussions they establish. The more specific interest relates to how the participants discuss current work experiences in relation to the contents of quality assurance they are expected to learn.

The data analyzed are Web discussions in forms of chat log files from ten courses.

The results show that, on the one hand, general principles have to be substantiated in the form of concrete examples to actually function as principles and, on the other hand, concrete examples are made interesting only if they have a bearing on a more general issue. Another interesting finding is that the course participants gradually take over the vocabulary of quality assurance; they more frequently write about their work in terms of, e.g. criteria, relevance, estimations and hazards. The conclusion is that Web discussions as part of in-service training constitute a new arena for reflection in and on practice.

This is interesting to explore, as it is designed to meet the needs of employers and employees to learn the new set of rules and procedures, which regulate the European food industry. In this respect, the training activities are of direct relevance to daily work practices. Simultaneously, online environments seem to offer flexibility and thus constitute a solution for training in a dispersed industry.

The following annotated list of materials on providing library orientation to users and instructing them in library and information skills is the tenth annual review of this literature and covers publications from 1983. A few items have not been annotated because the compiler was unable to secure a copy of these items.