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Social robots increasingly adopt service roles in the marketplace. While service research is beginning to unravel the implications for theory and practice, other scientific disciplines have amassed a wealth of empirical data of robots assuming such service roles. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize these findings from a role theory perspective with the aim of advancing role theory for human–robot service interaction (HRSI).

A systematic review of more than 10,000 articles revealed 149 empirical HRSI-related papers across scientific disciplines. The respective articles are analyzed employing qualitative content analysis through the lens of role theory.

This review develops an organizing structure of the HRSI literature across disciplines, delineates implications for role theory development in the age of social robots, and advances robotic role theory by providing an overarching framework and corresponding propositions. Finally, this review introduces avenues for future research.

This study pioneers a comprehensive review of empirical HRSI literature across disciplines adopting the lens of role theory. The study structures the body of HRSI literature, adapts traditional and derives novel propositions for role theory (i.e. robotic role theory), and delineates promising future research opportunities.

Human resource analytics (HRA) is an HR activity that companies and academics increasingly pay attention to. Existing literature conceptualises HRA mostly from an objectivist perspective, which limits understanding of actual HRA activities in the complex organisational environment. This paper therefore draws on the practice-based approach, using a novel framework to conceptualise HRA-as-practice.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review of 100 academic and practitioner-oriented publications to analyse existing HRA literature in relation to practice theory, using the “HRA-as-practice” frame.

The authors identify the main practices involved in HRA, by whom and how these practices are enacted, and reveal three topics in nomological network of HRA-as-practice: HRA technology, HRA outcomes and HRA hindrances and facilitators, which the authors suggest might actualize enactment of HRA practices.

The authors offer HR function and HR professionals a basic ground to evaluate HRA as a highly contextual activity that can potentially generate business value and increase HR impact when seen as a complex interaction between HRA practices, HRA practitioners and HRA praxis. The findings also help HR practitioners understand multiple factors that influence the practice of HRA.

This systematic review differs from the previous reviews in two ways. First, it analyses both academic and practitioner-oriented publications. Second, it provides a novel theoretical contribution by conceptualising HRA-as-practice and comprehensively compiling scattered topics and themes related to HRA.

This study aims to focus on a key unanswered question about how digitalization and the knowledge processes it enables affect firms’ strategies in the international arena.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering over 20 years of research (from 2000 to 2023) and including 73 journal papers.

This review allows us to highlight a relationship between firms’ international strategies and the knowledge processes enabled by applying digital technologies. Specifically, the authors discuss the characteristics of patterns of knowledge flows and knowledge processes (their origin, the type of knowledge they carry on and their directionality) as determinants for the emergence of diverse international strategies embraced by single firms or by populations of firms within ecosystems, networks, global value chains or alliances.

Despite digital technologies constituting important antecedents and critical factors for the internationalization process, and international businesses in general, and operating cross borders implies the enactment of highly knowledge-intensive processes, current literature still fails to provide a holistic picture of how firms strategically use what they know and seek out what they do not know in the international environment, using the affordances of digital technologies.

Digital technologies, and the affordances they provide, can shape institutional processes in significant ways. In the last decade, social media and other digital platforms have redefined civic engagement by enabling new ways of connecting, collaborating, and mobilizing. In this article, we examine how technological affordances can both enable and hinder institutional processes through visibilization – which we define as the enactment of technological features to foreground and give voice to particular perspectives and discourses while silencing others. We study such dynamics by examining #SchauHin, an activist campaign initiated in Germany to shine a spotlight on experiences of daily racism. Our findings show how actors and counter-actors differentially leveraged the technological features of two digital platforms to shape the campaign. Our study has implications for understanding the role of digital technologies in institutional processes as well as the interplay between affordances and visibility in efforts to deinstitutionalize discriminatory practices and institutions.

Social hackathons are events designed to craft social change using technology that enables citizen empowerment or addresses societal issues by deploying data. Hackathons provide a framework for organizing to help create prototypes and business models through interaction with technology. The relevance of the sociomateriality of the emergent technology (prototype) and organizational structure raises the question if viable and impactful solutions can be developed within such frames.

This study applies an inductive research methodology based on ethnographic participant observation, interviews with participants and event organizers, and qualitative insights from surveys.

Events such as social hackathons are centered around technology and share a vision of creating opportunities for change. The materiality of prototypes may define their interaction patterns. The differentiation of the embodiment and emergent structuration of technology may be a breaking point for in-group dynamics and a barrier to social innovation. The emergent structuration of technology with a longer initial phase of problem definition and ideation within a group was found to have more potential for impactful embodiment with the technological artifact. Some cases reveal that “expert” participants who shared visions of change enabled by technology were constrained by other members.

The paper suggests an extended view on the connection of sociomateriality, organizing and social impact.

Since Weick’s (1993) seminal Mann Gulch paper articulated a collapse of sensemaking, scholars have repeatedly investigated sensemaking downstream of enactment. Motivated by another wildland firefighting tragedy, the tragic loss of 19 firefighters in Arizona in 2013, this study aims to look at enactment itself and reveals that the endogenous creation and re-creation of the wildland fire caused a fatal feedback loop of “trigger traps” leading to perpetual enactment that short-circuited sensemaking. Wildland fires can have unpredictable consequences, which triggers in individual sensemakers a fatal and continuous return to the beginning of the sensemaking process.

This paper’s approach is a case study based on a textual analysis of sources investigating the 2013 Yarnell Hill fire. The authors also carefully compared the Yarnell Hill and Mann Gulch disasters in search of breakdowns in sensemaking that could help us understand why we continue to lose firefighters in the line of duty.

The simultaneously volatile and complex environment at Yarnell illustrates sensemaking antecedents to the study of enactment. The findings suggest ways that organizations – those fighting wildfire or those fighting a global pandemic – can avoid getting trapped in the early stages of enactment and can retain resilience in their sensemaking.

This paper introduces the concept of “trigger traps” to help explain the fatal feedback loop of repeated environmental triggers in the early stages of sensemaking in volatile environments.

Contemporary service and marketing research on value co-creation and value co-destruction assume a one-dimensional view on value, ranging from positive value co-creation, alignment and high value to negative value co-destruction, misalignment and low value. This limitation has recently led researchers to conceptually develop more dynamic spatial-temporal models of how value is formed during the interaction, e.g. in terms of different relationships between practice elements (procedures, understandings and engagements) both within and between actors in “value formation spaces”. However, much of this research awaits validation and is in need of more details. This study aims to address this limitation with the purpose of detailing how and why the mechanisms in such spaces are formed.

Two different and interlinked typologies were analytically derived from previous research and applied on ethnographically-inspired multi-perspective empirical data from a service combining health care and transport service ecosystems, using a combination of interviews, observations and service design methodologies. The design in combination with a practice theory perspective was used to articulate crucial aspects related to understanding the dynamics of value co-formation for elaborative and illustrative purposes.

The study contributes to service theory by conceptualizing as follows: a typology consisting of nine different configurations of practice elements (within and between such elements) and eight possible directions that value formation can take, suggesting a theory that explains value co-creation, value co-destruction and mixed cases.

Although the findings have been developed in a specific empirical context, they articulate a conceptualization applicable to many other service and marketing value co-formation settings.

The typologies are conceptual tools to be used in identifying and measuring the alignment/misalignment of practice elements in complex organizations. The empirical findings uncover service problems faced by disabled customers.

The suggested typologies can guide research and practitioners in understanding and analysing value co-formation mechanisms in complex service settings.

This article investigates whether accounting, a tool that affects the actions of both organisations and society, can contribute to further developing the concept of sustainability. Exploiting real-time accounts of management speeches, termed “managerial talk” in the context of this paper, the study is among the first to include technology within a sustainability framework.

A data structure with first-order and second-order categories was created using a methodology elaborated by Van Maanen (1979) and Gioia et al. (2012). The empirical data was collected during 20 presentations delivered by senior managers from companies, the financial industry, the Swedish government and non-profit organisations to the Swedish Society of Financial Analysts between November 2016 and February 2020.

The study develops an inductive model that emerges as a result of the data analysis process. It emphasises that technology can be both an enabler for, and an interference with, sustainability according to the application of steering mechanisms. The latter include governance and regulations, analysis and evaluation tools, and disclosure practice.

Acknowledging the role of technology in sustainable development can potentially assist in the implementation of sustainability and, arguably, in fostering an alignment between the three pillars of sustainability.

Interrelationships between sustainability, technology and accounting comprise a relatively unexplored research setting that has seldom been at the centre of academic studies.

Only a few concepts in the service literature are as pervasive yet as undertheorized as is the concept of the actor. With a growing interest toward value creation as a systemic and institutionally guided phenomenon, there is a particular need for a more robust conceptualization of humans as actors that adopts a processual, as opposed to a static, view. The purpose of this paper is to build such processual conceptualization to advance service-dominant (S-D) logic, in particular, and service research, in general.

The paper is conceptual and extends S-D logic's institutionally constituted account of the actor by drawing from identity theory and social constructionism.

The paper develops a processual conceptualization of the human actor that explicates four social processes explaining the dynamics between two identity concepts—social and personal identity—and institutional arrangements. The resulting framework reveals how humans are simultaneously constituted by institutions and able to perform their roles in varying, even institution-changing, ways.

By introducing new insights from identity theory and social constructionism, this paper reconciles the dualism in S-D logic's current description of actors, as well as posits the understanding of identity dynamics and the processual nature of actors as central in many service-related phenomena.

This paper is among the few that explicitly theorize about the nature of human actors in S-D logic and the service literature.

The implementation of mobile health (mHealth) in developing countries seems to be stuck in a pattern of successive pilot studies that struggle for mainstream implementation. This study addresses the research question: what existing health-related structures, properties and practices are presented by rural areas of developing countries that might inhibit the implementation of mHealth initiatives?

This study was conducted using a socio-material approach, based on an exploratory case study in West Africa. Interviews and participant observation were used to gather data. A thematic analysis identified important social and material agencies, practices and imbrications which may limit the effectiveness of mHealth apps in the region.

Findings show that, while urban healthcare is highly structured, best practice-led, rural healthcare relies on peer-based knowledge sharing, and community support. This has implications for the enacted materiality of mobile technologies. While urban actors see mHealth as a tool for automation and the enforcement of responsible healthcare best practice, rural actors see mHealth as a tool for greater interconnectivity and independent, decentralised care.

This study has two significant limitations. First, the study focussed on a region where technology-enabled guideline-driven treatment is the main mHealth concern. Second, consistent with the exploratory nature of this study, the qualitative methodology and the single-case design, the study makes no claim to statistical generalisability.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to adopt a socio-material view that considers existing structures and practices that may influence the widespread adoption and assimilation of a new mHealth app. This helps identify contextual challenges that are limiting the potential of mHealth to improve outcomes in rural areas of developing countries.