Call for Papers JSR: Human-Robot Interactions in Service

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Service Research.

Human-Robot Interactions in Service

Guest Editors: van Doorn J, Odekerken-Schröder G & Spohrer J

Deadline: 1 October 2023

JSR invites submissions for a multisector, multidisciplinary, multicultural special issue on Human-Robot Interactions in Service. JSR is broad, interdisciplinary, and impactful. JSR ranked 2nd (top 1%) out of 1,345 Sociology Political Sciences, and ranked 10th out of 2,087 Business, Management and Accounting journals in CiteScore.

The rise of service robots across industry sectors is accelerating, including health care, retail, education, and hospitality. The nature of human-robot interactions within a wide range of service systems is therefore being studied from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including marketing, information systems, computer science, operations research, and organizational behavior, among others. The cultural and demographic factors that influence outcomes of interactions between diverse people and social robots is also increasingly relevant.

We particularly welcome submissions based on field studies that cover various stakeholders’ perspectives in complex, real-world service systems. We also encourage submissions based on academic-practitioner collaborations.

Potential research questions include, but are not limited to:
– How will advancing technological capabilities including affective computing, commonsense reasoning, human-like episodic memory, and more play a role in enabling new social robot applications across industries?
– How do advancing social robot technologies avoid seeming creepy, while ensuring safe, ethical, sustainable service system improvements?
– What is the effect of human-robot interactions on other actors, such as customers, frontline employees, and other users, in socially complex environments?
– What are success factors of, and barriers to, robot implementation in practice? What is the path to profitability of commercial service robots? Does this differ across different industries and cultures?
– What new skills and organizational engagement processes are needed to compete in this emerging market?
– Under which conditions can a service robot be a worthy assistant/collaborator or an effective coach/mediator, for instance in transformative services such as health care and education?
What are the priorities for future research on human-robot interactions within this multi-industry, multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multi-organizational domain?

The special issue operates on a tight timeline, and authors should expect quick turnaround for reviews and revisions. The special issue is planned to be published in November 2024 and accepted papers will be published online first.

Special issue co-editors:
Jenny van Doorn, University of Groningen
Gaby Odekerken-Schröder, Maastricht University
Jim Spohrer, International Society of Service Innovation Professionals

Please submit to this Special Issue via the Journal of Service Research website: www.journals.sagepub.com/home/jsr

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