Ascribed Meanings to Self- Service Technologies: Exploring Grocery Shopper’s Use of SSTs and Subsequent Meanings held in a Digitalised World

Sammanfattning: Recent years have seen digitalisation entangled in everyday life; with the broader context of a digitalised world, one can no longer see the digitalised retail space and its technological artefacts as a lone-standing phenomena. Instead, it is necessary to see digitalisation as way of understanding and being in the modern world. This paper explores the practices and subsequent meanings in the use of these technological artefacts in the grocery shopping space with the idea in mind that the shopper is digitally conscious and takes away more from the digital experience than just convenience and independence. Relating the concept of communities of practice to the learning components of meaning, practice and community, the study was carried out ethnographically. The findings were that certainly the overriding feeling about digitisation had far reaching implications to the use and subsequent meanings of self-service technologies. There were other external influences that played a part in shopper’s perceptions of technological artefacts, such as other communities of practice where knowledge is inferred. Also, value emerged from practice and engaging with the self-service technology. Most surprisingly, the homogenous nature of the SST were made to be a branded experience by the customer, rather than the retailer. While the findings were theoretically based, they were relayed into managerial applications to propose alternate ways of utilisation of SST for managers.