Following the invention and proliferation of the Internet, Web and mobile technologies, we have seen a global revolution in retailing. Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce, the online grocery shopping market has taken until now to gain traction, currently constituting 6.9% of the UK's grocery market, but projected to increase 68.3% to £17.6bn by 2021. There is little work accounting for new and contingent behaviours in the online grocery market, not least because of historically poor access to retailers' data. This paper leverages access to the UK's fourth largest supermarket, WM Morrisons Plc (Morrisons) to investigate consumer behaviour in this market, augmenting the Office for National Statistics' Living Costs and Food Survey, the UK's only substantial publicly available resource to date. This paper establishes that there have been changes in consumer behaviours in response to the unique opportunities and challenges of online grocery shopping and explores the specific socio-technical factors that may be contributing to these changes, namely: ease of price comparison; attitudes to purchasing perishable goods online; and logistical considerations. Furthermore, it provides some evidence that the proportion of fresh products bought online exceeds the proportion bought offline, contrary to popular belief. Finally, this paper argues that with correction for location bias, the Morrisons sample could provide a proxy for examining online grocery behaviour in-depth at the national level.
This paper sets out an approach to Social Machines (SMs), their description and analysis, based on a development of social constructionist theoretical principles adapted for Web Science. We argue that currently the search for the primitives of SMs, or appropriate units of analysis to describe them, tends to favour either the technology or sociality. We suggest an approach that favours distributed agency whether it is machinic or human or both. We argue that current thinking (e.g. Actor Network Theory) is unsuited to SMs. Instead we describe an alternative which prioritizes a view of socio-technical activity as forming 'reflexive project structures'. We show that reflexivity in social systems can be further usefully divided into more fundamental elements (Recognition and Responsivity). This process enables us to capture more of the variation in SMs and to distinguish them from non-Web based socio-technical systems. We illustrate the approach by looking at different kinds of SMs showing how they relate to contemporary social theory.
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