Search results

Anthropomorphism in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered devices is being used increasingly frequently in consumer-facing situations (e.g., AI Assistants such as Alexa, virtual agents in websites, call/chat bots, etc.), and therefore, it is essential to understand anthropomorphism in AI both to understand consequences for consumers and to optimize firms' product development and marketing. Extant literature is fragmented across several domains and is limited in the marketing domain. In this review, we aim to bring together the insights from different fields and develop a parsimonious conceptual framework to guide future research in fields of marketing and consumer behavior.

We conduct a review of empirical articles published until November 2021 in Financial Times Top 50 (FT50) journals as well as in 41 additional journals selected across several disciplinary domains: computer science, robotics, psychology, marketing, and consumer behavior.

Based on literature review and synthesis, we propose a three-step guiding framework for future research and practice on AI anthropomorphism.

Our proposed conceptual framework informs marketing and consumer behavior domains with findings accumulated in other research domains, offers important directions for future research, and provides a parsimonious guide for marketing managers to optimally utilize anthropomorphism in AI to the benefit of both firms and consumers.

We contribute to the emerging literature on anthropomorphism in AI in three ways. First, we expedite the information flow between disciplines by integrating insights from different fields of inquiry. Second, based on our synthesis of literature, we offer a conceptual framework to organize the outcomes of AI anthropomorphism in a tidy and concise manner. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we offer key directions to guide future research endeavors.

In the digital economy, what are the strategies of multinationals from developed countries and emerging markets? How do regulations in the home country affect their growth? Recent digital multinationals in diverse national and institutional contexts raise questions that require new approaches in international business (IB) studies. This chapter examines two leading firms in the global e-commerce industry: Amazon and Alibaba. We compare their digital capabilities and physical asset-building strategies over the past two decades and we connect the Internet governance environment in the United States and China with their business models and internationalization patterns. We argue that despite the platform and global nature of Amazon’s and Alibaba’s activities, the recent moves of governments across the world to regulate Internet governance poses an important challenge for digital multinationals. This research features a comparative analysis of two prominent digital multinationals and identifies a promising area for future IB strategy studies.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

To determine gendered patterns of preventive medical care (physical and dental/optical) use among pan-ethnic U.S. Asian and Latino adults.

Using National Latino and Asian American Study (2004) data, we apply Andersen’s (1995) Behavioral Model of Health Services Use to assess how preventive care use among Asian and Latino men and women varies as a function of predisposing, enabling, and need-based characteristics. We explore whether adjustment for these factors mediates gender disparities in both physical and dental/optical check-ups, and test whether certain factors operate differently among men versus women.

A higher proportion of women reported a routine care visit last year, especially among Latinos. Adjusting for predisposing, enabling, and need-based factors explained the gender difference in reporting a dental/optician check-up, but not a physical check-up, among both Asian and Latino adults.

Our findings illustrate how gender patterns in routine care use differ by race/ethnicity, and highlight the fundamental importance of enabling characteristics (especially health insurance and having a regular doctor) for shaping routine care use between men and women, both Asian and Latino. Limitations of this chapter are that the data are cross-sectional and were collected before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and measures are self-reported.

This chapter focuses on Asian and Latinos because they represent the fastest growing minority populations in the United States, yet few studies have evaluated gender differences in preventative health care use among these groups.

Historically, sex, tourism, and the labor market have long been inextricably linked, but media concerns about sex as the main purpose of tourism, and its effects on the host group and its sex workers, date from the mid-1990s, in the wake of the spread of HIV, the collapse of communism, the rise of the Internet, and the increasing influence of NGOs concerned with women's and children's welfare. This chapter argues that in order to understand fully the relationship between tourism, sex, and the labor market, we need to adopt a broader perspective and look at the various intersections between the three factors, and how they blend into and influence each other. It conceptualizes the three domains of tourism, sex, and work as intersecting circles and analyzes the forms of activity typical of each. “Sex tourism,” as popularly defined, is the space where all three overlap, but there are significant areas of sexual activity associated with tourism that are not commercial, and yet that generate significant and increasing business activity in some destinations. There is also a tendency for partners in commercial sex to define their relationships in terms of other sectors, as “love” or “romance.” The chapter concludes that with economic development, there is a tendency for roles in the sex industry to become increasingly professionalized and differentiated, and that as the industry is unlikely to disappear, regulation should focus on the empowerment and welfare of sex workers rather than abolition and suppression.

In the contemporary US, pregnant women must navigate competing ideas about their bodies, including expectations for weight gain. Given that there are few social spaces where women may gain weight without disapproval, pregnancy represents a period when women are allowed to put on weight. However, gaining weight means doing so within the context of the obesity “epidemic” and increased medical surveillance of the body. To explore how women navigate the medicalization of pregnancy weight, I draw on data from in-depth interviews with 40 pregnant and recently pregnant women. Findings indicate that women reframe the meaning of pregnancy weight as “baby weight,” rather than body weight. This allows them to view it as a temporary condition that is “for the baby,” while holding two concurrent body images – a pregnant and a non-pregnant version of themselves. Women also resist the quantification of their maternity weight, either by not keeping track or not looking at scales in the doctor’s office. Doing so prevented baby weight from turning back into body weight – a concrete and meaningful number on the scale. Such resistance to quantification is often accomplished with the help of doctors and healthcare professionals who do not explicitly discuss weight gain with their patients. These findings suggest that women rely on a variety of strategies to navigate the medicalization of pregnancy weight, and provides another lens through which to understand how and why women may make similar choices about other medicalized aspects of their pregnancy (or pregnancy experiences).

Accountability is ubiquitous in social systems, and its necessity is magnified in formal organizations, whose purpose has been argued to predict and control behavior. The very notion of organizing necessitates answering to others, and this feature implies an interface of work and social enterprises, the individuals comprising them, and subunits from dyads to divisions. Because the nature of workplace accountability is multi-level as well as interactive, single-level conceptualizations of the phenomenon are incomplete and inherently misleading. In response, this chapter sets forth a meso-level conceptualization of accountability, which develops a more comprehensive understanding of this pervasive and imperative phenomenon. The meso model presented integrates contemporary theory and research, and extends our perspectives beyond individual, group, unit, or organizational perspectives toward a unitary whole. Following this is a description of challenges and opportunities facing scholars conducting accountability research (e.g., data collection and analysis and non-traditional conceptualizations of workplace phenomenon). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as are directions for future research.