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碩士/碩專班畢業論文

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超商店員何以萬能?便利商店勞動形成與過程探究
(研究生:張立祥)(指導教授:葉欣怡)

刊登日期:2018-02-07  
友善列印
台灣便利商店自1980年代發展至今,已成為最具規模之連鎖商店事業體,除了店數已突破萬餘間,販售的產品與服務也不斷擴充,促使店員必須學習漸增的商品製作知識,也讓「萬能店員」成為在這個場域工作者的代號,相對於超商工作本身的低門檻和去技術化後的簡單操作流程,兩種歧異視角凸顯超商工作的內在矛盾。本文以完全參與觀察,配合半結構式深度訪談、歷史新聞整理、常民經驗紀錄與官方數據之彙整,以勞動過程研究為主軸、行動者網絡理論為工具,試圖解構超商工作既源於簡化的設計,又如何形成當今事務數量遽增的萬能店員。

   研究結果顯示:便利商店內個別事務以標準化且簡化的流程設計,在推出新產品同時引入全新的技術物,但在技術物增加時,也將相應的操作流程帶入,而這些實際的操作才是店員工作的基本單位。伴隨時間的推進,超商操作流程數量面臨前所未有的巨大規模,除了技術物有其相應操作流程,與顧客應對也有互動服務業的標準化規則,導致店員同時面臨人類與非人類數量增加,以及相應的操作與溝通之爆炸性增長。本文也以此實證經驗發展組合勞動這一全新勞動概念,旨在說明當代互動服務業相對於分工的勞動型態,更傾向採取多工、組合式的運作,並以協調人為基礎進行與人類/非人類行動者的溝通及任務安排,其中「協調」正是此類工作的核心目標。 


Convenience stores have become the greatest chain store business since 1980s in Taiwan. Despite the amount of stores has already broken ten thousand, its products and services keep extending to an amazing degree. Under this circumstance, it results in CVS-clerks’ need to continuously learn more knowledge and skills to fulfill all the tasks, and bear the nickname from popular of “omnipotentclerk.” Nevertheless, there has been a viewpoint which regards CVS-clerk is a low threshold job and to operate the required procedures merely needs de-skilled personnel. It is clear that there is a contradiction between these two perspectives. To delve into this intriguing issue, this article adopts multiple research methods, which includes full participant observation and semi-structured interviews, matching with given newspaper articles, official quantitative data, and other information on CVS working experience as well. This research wants to investigate what happens when CVS-clerks is always so busy while everything that they have to fulfill is such an easy task. For the very purpose, I base on given labor-process concepts, and also take Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) as an important research approach to form my research framework. 

The research has several findings: whereas every single-task in CVS is designed as a standard-operating-process(SOP)and simplified, each new product indicates a new technical thing and a new SOP is introduced in and this inevitably complicates the simplified SOPs. That is to say, each new product and service represents a different working task and additional knowledge/know-how; consequently, the simplified SOPs weaves a complicated web. In fact, I argue, these tasks are the basic unit for clerk. Over time, a large quantity of tasks the clerk has to deal with is much more. Besides numerous work sequences attaching to technical things, the CVS-clerks also need to interact with customers following company rules . In result, the clerks have to handle large amount of human actors and non-human actants, and confront explosive growth quantum of operative and communicative tasks. Therefore, I propose a new concept of “assembled labor” to explain that our society tends to adopt multi-tasking and composed work types rather than division-of-labor in the interactive service field. This kind of working arrangement regards coordinators – in my case, the CVS-clerks – as the central actors between human actors and non-human actants, and “coordination” turns to be the core target for CVS-clerks.