Food is on the Way! What do Mobile Robots in Restaurants Teach us About Embodiment?

In this paper, we report on an ongoing ethnography in a restaurant setting, exploring the implications of introducing robotics for work practices. Restaurant work is a distinct case of physical, embodied practices; examining the use of robots in such a setting allows us to analyze what happens to learnt embodied practices once a new actor, such as an autonomous mobile robot, is introduced into an existing collective. Additionally, the restaurant setting also brings to the fore how actors perceive and act in a structured yet constantly changing environment, leading to frequent surprises that must be addressed throughout the workday.

During fieldwork, the aspect of movement emerged as an important but previously underexplored dimension of sociomaterial, and specifically embodied practices. Existing research in organization studies has collectively emphasized the importance of the body in performing work but have not yet provided a conceptual language for understanding the movement of actors within their environment. This ethnography of mobile robots in a restaurant aims to address this question.

The current analysis focuses on comparing the differences between embodied practices of restaurant work performed with and without robots. In particular, we distinguish different movement patterns and practices performed by restaurant workers. To guide the analysis, we turned to J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception because it offers a way to account for tacit embodied action in the restaurant environment. The analysis reveals how in the course of performing work, robots alternate between being related to as “part of the environment” and as a “tool,” and how workers' movements are reconfigured in response to the presence of the robots in both instances. To unpack these reconfigurations of movement, this study offers new conceptual language for embodied movement: speed, direction, and dynamic posture.