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Pereira, J., Viseu, A., Vicente, P. N. & Delicado, Ana (2024). ‘Autonomous stores’ as a new paradigm for retail? Sociotechnical imaginaries and media representations. XV Congreso Español de Sociología.

J. P. Pereira et al.,  "‘Autonomous stores’ as a new paradigm for retail? Sociotechnical imaginaries and media representations", in XV Congreso Español de Sociología, Sevilha, 2024

@misc{pereira2024_1732500885997,
	author = "Pereira, J. and Viseu, A. and Vicente, P. N. and Delicado, Ana",
	title = "‘Autonomous stores’ as a new paradigm for retail? Sociotechnical imaginaries and media representations",
	year = "2024",
	howpublished = "Impresso",
	url = "https://congreso2024.fes-sociologia.com/"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - ‘Autonomous stores’ as a new paradigm for retail? Sociotechnical imaginaries and media representations
T2  - XV Congreso Español de Sociología
AU  - Pereira, J.
AU  - Viseu, A.
AU  - Vicente, P. N.
AU  - Delicado, Ana
PY  - 2024
CY  - Sevilha
UR  - https://congreso2024.fes-sociologia.com/
AB  - ‘Autonomous stores’ are often characterized in the media as the future of shopping:
smart physical environments augmented (Viseu, 2003; Viseu & Suchman, 2010)
through digital technologies that can process data automatically, seamlessly and
without the need for workers, identifying both consumers and their actions. References
to autonomy and automation conjure a set of imaginaries of technology in the service
of innovation and progress: for consumers these new and “modern“ spaces are
proposed to signify gains in convenience, whereby saving time is saving money. For
retailers, they mean the possibility of gathering significant amounts of information on
the behaviour of the customers in a store environment, thus perhaps being another
manifestation of what Zuboff (2019) calls ‘Surveillance Capitalism’. 
Despite being hailed as autonomous, these spaces are vast digital assemblages that
rely upon networked infrastructures composed of people, knowledges, and numerous
technological entities (such as, AI, sensors, algorithms, computer vision, cameras).
Portugal is one of the leaders in this future-making endeavour:  in 2019, SENSEI, a
Portuguese “unicorn” specialized in the development of autonomous stores
technologies, partnered with SONAE, one of the largest Portuguese retail chains, to
open ‘Continente Labs’ an autonomous store in Lisbon.  

This paper draws upon a thematic analysis of data generated from a media analysis of
Portuguese and international newspaper articles from 2016 until 2023, combined with
an ethnographic approach based on in-depth interviews with key actors from SENSEI
and SONAE to examine the sociotechnical imaginaries that are being mobilized in both
the media and the developers of such technologies, which help to justify the
development of these “cyber-physical-human” systems (Liu, 2018).
We pay particular attention to the discourses through which they are built: Who is
pushing for them? Why? What are the main issues that are being discussed both in
terms of advantages and problems? Who is included/excluded? And, finally, what
futures are being built? This will then allow us to shed light on the concepts that
underlie these spaces – What are the concepts of “autonomy” and “smartness” really
refering to?
ER  -