Although the current trend is to shop online supermarkets still have customers, especially around rush hour. In Denmark, when we shop in person, we meet just a few junior (often young) staff members who perform the routine but essential retail tasks like stocking shelves, arranging displays, working on the tills, cleaning counters, and sweeping the floor. Such work seems simple but behind it there exists a complex, increasingly technological, global chain of markets, production, and transportation. To function within these challenging spheres requires skills that must be learned and further developed within a commercial, organisational framework, yet how these are acquired is rarely studied. So, this project sets out to examine and analyse internal training and educational practices in retail, focusing on the basic workforce up to mid-level management. 

At the conference I will present preliminary findings and ideas for further research.

The background for the project is that the public education system, since WWII, has been part of an extensive education project (Imsen et al., 2017) which ensures that as citizens in the welfare state we in Denmark share a common view of society and consequently of how education should be understood and performed. Within this unilinear perspective, other forms of educational activities become invisible, particularly those that increasingly take place outside the welfare state's value framework, such as internships and training within the retail area. Even when it is acknowledged that the public and business sectors are not two separate worlds but interact and rely on each other at many points (Pedersen, 2011), training activities remain shrouded, for the educational activities of floor workers and management are not a fundamental part of a business’s daily activities. Dealing with specific competencies together with liberal and commercial values and attitudes requires worldviews that differ from those embedded in public education.

The overarching framework for this project is an analysis of how cultural worlds that traditionally are categorically apart, meet. Attitudes towards the other – a possibly unknown world – shape our ideas about ourselves even while we enhance our understanding of the unfamiliar. Taking a sociological perspective, and inspired by Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame (1981), the study will seek to capture values and attitudes related to working in the business area from both within and outside retail. Furthermore, it will study young people who work and have careers within large retail chains: for personal, familial, and social reasons, significant numbers of retail employees have earlier opted out of public education programmes and are hence seen as individuals with 'No education'. However, this label often obscures other forms of educational activity: partly completed educational programmes, study undertaken outside Denmark, or informal learning from participation in civic society.

The questions the project will seek to answer are: What leads to the choice of a career in retail and which dynamics within families, school, society, and companies propel the young into retail? What are the young employees’ stories about their working life, and their understandings of possibilities in the organisational field they act within? Do discontinued studies or civic educational engagement influence the choice to work in retail and, if so, how? Moreover, what can we learn from this encounter between the cultural worlds in business and the public school system?

Phase I: Ethnographic observation and biographical interviews. Later phases: questionnaire and register data.

As the project is in a preliminary phase - none yet

Bertaux, D., & Bertaux-Wiame, I. (1981). Artisanal Bakery in France. In F. Bechhofer & B. Elliott (Eds.), The Petite Bourgeoisie. Imsen, G., Blossing, U., & Moos, L. (2017). Reshaping the Nordic education model in an era of efficiency. Changes in the comprehensive school project in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden since the millennium. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 61(5), 568–583. Pedersen, O. K. (2011). Konkurrencestaten. Hans Reitzels Forlag.