Guest article by Marah Blaurock and Alexander Henkel.
(More about the Let’s Talk about Service LTAS 2022 event here).
1. Can you tell us a bit about how your team of four young scholars living and working across Europe came together to research service robots?
Our collaboration on service robots initially started during the 2018 Let’s Talk About Service (LTAS) workshop in Ghent (Belgium). For this edition, the objective lay on teaming up young service scholars with similar research interests and initiating collaboration on a systematic literature review. In our team, we quickly identified the increasing role that service robots assume in the marketplace as a common research interest and noted an underrepresentation of empirical studies on this topic in service-related outlets, while an abundance of service-relevant data had been documented in other disciplines. Hence, we saw a great opportunity to contribute to the literature by synthesizing this wealth of knowledge on human-robot service interaction (HRSI). At that time, the conference put a focus on bringing together research teams with similar research interests with the ultimate goal of starting a research project based using meta analyses or systematic literature reviews. In our group, we soon identified the increasing role that service robots assume in the marketplace as a common research interest and noted an underrepresentation of empirical studies on this topic in service-related outlets, while a wealth of relevant data had been documented in other disciplines. Hence, we saw a great opportunity to contribute to literature by synthesizing this great wealth of knowledge on human-robot service interaction (HRSI).
2. After the LTAS conference back in 2018, how did you continue working together to move forward to realize your research project?
Having only met at the LTAS conference, not knowing each other’s working style, living in different countries with varying time zones and still being a bit fuzzy about the research question on a granular level, it took us a couple of video calls to figure out the way to go and grow as a team. But ultimately, we started our first project: an extensive literature review on HRSI across scientific disciplines. We took a very conservative approach and screened over 13,500 articles for their relevance of documenting empirical findings on consumer-robot interactions in a service context. This effort resulted in a comprehensive literature review that served as a solid basis for our follow-up projects. The respective systematic review has recently been published in the International Journal of Consumer Studies
(DOI: 10.1111/ijcs.12808). However, even though this was the first project we started, it was not our first joint publication.
3. So what was this other project and did you not first need to have an overview of the literature before setting it up?
Soon after the pandemic had its grip on society, we started discussing its implications for consumers and service provision now and in the future. In particular, we noted first empirical evidence documenting negative consequences for the psychological well-being of vulnerable, socially isolated consumers. We discussed this situation through our service robot lens, and leveraged our transdisciplinary database to identify empirical evidence for how service robots could help advance consumer well-being.
And you are completely right, at this point we hadn’t finished coding our data. However, we had already gained a good overview of the literature for ourselves—it had just not been structured and written up for publication yet. We thus went ahead and identified the most vulnerable and socially isolated consumers during the Covid pandemic based on recent evidence (i.e., older adults and children) and searched our database for well-being-relevant studies on robot interactions for these two consumer groups. We then advanced a typology of four social robots equipped to advance consumer well-being depending on the state of social isolation (i.e., objective or subjective) and well-being focus (i.e., hedonic or eudaimonic). The project was published in the Special Issue on Covid-19 in the Journal of Service Management (DOI: 10.1108/JOSM-05-2020-0145).
4. So this second project was only relevant for deploying service robots for the well-being of vulnerable consumers in social isolation?
Yes, absolutely! First, while the typology we have developed was indeed addressing the social isolation of vulnerable consumers during Covid-19 (let’s hope that this chapter is closing on us), social isolation and especially loneliness, remain to be of concern to the well-being of many (vulnerable) consumers, irrespective of society-wide limitations of physical contact. Second, our paper’s main contribution is the founding of an interdisciplinary research stream on well-being-directed research of human interactions with service robots which, paying homage to our service discipline, we coined Robotic Transformative Service Research (RTSR).
5. This sounds really interesting! Now I am curious about your latest project.
Well, our latest project directly feeds from the database we had developed for our first project. Instead of providing a rather descriptive and functional overview to help other researchers quickly grasp the entirety of studies on consumer interactions with social robots, here, we wanted to apply a strong service lens and synthesize the data from the perspective of one of the long-standing theories in service: role theory. Service interactions with robots are distinct from service interactions among humans and while some conceptual aspects of role theory still apply to robots, others do not, while still others needed to be developed from scratch. We advanced novel propositions for robotic role theory that are direct adaptations of classic (human) role theory, and derived concrete future research avenues per proposition that are particularly tailored to service research. The respective paper just appeared in the Journal of Service Management (DOI: 10.1108/JOSM-09-2021-0345)
6. Ok, sounds like there is a lot of future research potential in the area of service robots?
Absolutely. We identified plenty of gaps and research avenues in each of our projects that warrant investigation by service researchers. With the further adoption and development of service robots, this list will only be extended further.
7. This sounds like you want to continue working together in your LTAS set-up and have more robot papers in the pipeline?
Yes, we will certainly continue working on this fascinating topic, but delineating details at this point would be premature.
8. Your LTAS collaboration turned out to be pretty successful thus far. Considering that the 2022 LTAS conference in Hasselt is right around the corner, what tips do you have for coming LTAS teams?
To be honest, it was not always easy in the beginning to form a team. We all came from different universities and countries and were at different stages of our academic and private lives which demanded varying priorities. Even though we now work together for over three years, some of us have met the last time in person during LTAS in 2018. In a virtual team, we found it takes even longer to establish trust and get to know each other’s personalities and working styles. Regarding our online meetings, we really went from awkward to awesome throughout the years. Based on our experience, we believe the following tips might be of help for upcoming LTAS teams:
1. Responsibilities:
A few weeks into our collaboration, one of our team members decided to use the LTAS research project as part of her PhD. At that point, the first author for our main project was defined and Marah took over most project management and preparation tasks. This really helped us move the collaboration forward as we had one person that not only drove the research process but also organized us as a team. Importantly, every team member was operationally involved with every step of the project. However, we decided to allocate tasks and distribute the load early-on in the process, also to reach clarity on the order of authors. Importantly here, Alex decided to leave the stage to the early-stage researchers for the main project.
2. Persistence:
Don’t give up on your team and make meetings happen regularly – account for a great amount of time for team building and defining the final research questions. Also, in virtual teams, do not shy away from longer online meetings with (individual) brainstorming sessions.
3. Face-to-face meetings:
Make face-to-face meetings happen. Even though we mostly met online, some team members visited each other and worked together for a few days on the joint project. This really moved the project forward and fostered trust and team spirit.
4. Leverage the strengths of each team member:
As mentioned before, all of us were at different stages of our academic career and we all brought different strengths, expertise and also time banks to the table. Getting to know each other better, we tried to leverage these strengths in our projects when allocating different tasks and always considered individual time restrictions.
5. Attendance:
Last but not least, attend the LTAS conference and find your team—the next conference takes place in December 2022 in Hasselt, Belgium with the 10th of September 2022 being the application deadline.
9. Thank you for your time and I am sure we will read more from you in the future.
Thank you so much for having us!
Marah Blaurock, Doctoral Candidate at the Institute of Marketing and Management, University of Hohenheim, Germany.
Alexander P. Henkel, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Management, Open University of the Netherlands
Martina Čaić, Assistant Professor at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland
Mehmet Okan, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Management, Artvin Çoruh University, Turkey
