Easier material management - at what cost? : Librarians meet IMMS

Intelligent Material Management System, IMMS, was developed in a collaboration between Lyngsoe Systems, a commercial company, and public libraries in Aarhus and Copenhagen, Denmark, with the aim to reduce the time staff spend on managing library materials. The aim of this article is to shed light on what IMMS means for the library practices and hence for the librarian profession. Two research questions will guide the analysis: How do librarians and IMMS interplay at the public library in Copenhagen, Denmark? How does the implementation of IMMS impact the library practices at the branch libraries in Copenhagen, Denmark? With the theoretical lens of practice theory, the article shows how new norms and rules as well as new tools and objects are implemented with IMMS. Librarians need to be able to work with the new objects and tools, the new norms and to create an inspiring library room for library users. Their relation to collection management is changed, and their ability to evaluate materials is not needed in the same way when it comes to selection of titles for the collection. This sometimes creates a tension between the librarian and the system, especially when the librarians’ role in the practice is to perform the decision-making by the algorithm, and not to use their skills to evaluate resources

Gender and Mobility – A Literature Review on Women\u27s (Non-)Use of Shared Mobility Services

In the context of the development of smart cities, the number and types of shared mobility solutions, such as carsharing and bikesharing, have increased in recent years. While the services are generally becoming more popular, there are comparatively few women among the users. With a view to gender-equitable mobility, this literature review explores gender-specific reasons for this low use of shared mobility solutions. Based on 35 relevant studies from multiple databases and disciplines, we identified four overarching barriers related to: security, availability, simplicity, and costs. By identifying these barriers and the reasons for them, and by linking them in a self-developed conceptual model with starting points for potential actions to address these issues, this literature review contributes to gender-equitable mobility

Eliminating Customer Experience Pain Points in Complex Customer Journeys through Smart Service Solutions

Scholarly understanding of customer journeys has evolved from a linear, single service provider perspective to encompass complex service delivery networks that involve multiple touchpoints governed by various service providers. This intricate setting often gives rise to experiential pain points for customers. To investigate this phenomenon within the context of airport services, our research employs critical incident and problem-centered interviews as well as an analysis of 7192 online airport reviews. In Studies 1a and 2a, we explore the crucial pain points that travelers encounter throughout their airport journey. Complementing these insights, Studies 1b and 2b assess the impact of the identified pain points on travelers' emotions. Building upon a classification of pain points into information, performance, and hospitality themes, Study 3 further examines how smart service solutions, as new technologies, can address and resolve these pain points, ultimately enhancing the customer experience (CX). By accomplishing these objectives, our work contributes a comprehensive classification scheme for experiential pain points in complex customer journeys to the academic discourse on customer journeys. Furthermore, it establishes a connection to the emerging field of research on the impact of smart service solutions on the CX

Can social robots affect children's prosocial behavior? An experimental study on prosocial robot models

The aim of this study was to investigate whether a social robot that models prosocial behavior (in terms of giving away stickers) influences the occurrence of prosocial behavior among children as well as the extent to which children behave prosocially. Additionally, we investigated whether the occurrence and extent of children's prosocial behavior changed when being repeated and whether the behavior modeled by the robot affected children's norms of prosocial behavior. In a one-factorial experiment (weakly prosocial robot vs. strongly prosocial robot), 61 children aged 8 to 10 and a social robot alternately played four rounds of a game against a computer and, after each round, could decide to give away stickers. Children who saw a strongly prosocial robot gave away more stickers than children who saw a weakly prosocial robot. A strongly prosocial robot also increased children's perception of how many other children engage in prosocial behavior (i.e., descriptive norms). The strongly prosocial robot affected the occurrence of prosocial behavior only in the first round, whereas its effect on the extent of children's prosocial behavior was most distinct in the last round. Our study suggests that the principles of social learning also apply to whether children learn prosocial behavior from robots

The Adaptive Consequences of Pride in Personal Selling

Study 1 investigates the beneficial effects of experiencing pride. Pride was found to have two different effects. First, it increases salespersons’ performance-related motivations. Specifically, it promotes adaptive selling strategies, greater effort, and self-efficacy. Secondly, it positively affects organizational citizenship behaviors. Study 2 takes an emotion-process point of view and compares excessive pride (hubris) with positive pride. The results show that salespeople are capable of self-regulating the expression of these emotions via anticipated feelings of fear, shame, and regret. Salespeople in other words are affected by their emotions, but they also are capable of controlling them to their advantage.marketing;hubris;meta-emotions;organizational citizenship behaviors;pride;work motivation

Self-Adaptation of mHealth Devices: The Case of the Smart Cane Platform

Nowadays, more than one billion people are in need of one or more assistive technologies, and this number is expected to increase beyond two billion by 2050. The majority of assistive technologies are supported by battery-operated devices like smartphones and wearables. This means that battery weight is an important concern in such assistive devices because it may affect negatively its ergonomics. Saving power in these assistive devices is of utmost importance for its potential twofold benefits: extend the device life and reduce the global warming aggravated by billion of these devices. Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) are a suitable technology that supports system adaptation, in this case, to reduce energy consumption at runtime, considering contextual information and the current state of the device. However, a reduction in battery consumption could negatively affect other quality of service parameters, like response time. Therefore, it is important to trade-off battery saving and these other concerns. This work illustrates how to approach the self-adaptation of smart assistive devices by means of a DSPL-based strategy that optimizes battery consumption taking into account other QoS parameters at the same time. We illustrate our proposal with a real case study: a Smart Cane that is integrated with a DSPL platform, Tanit. Experimentation shows that it is possible to make a trade-off between different quality concerns (energy consumption and relative error). The results of the experiments allow us to conclude that the Tanit approach elongates battery duration of the Smart Cane in one day (an increase of a 6% with a relative error of 1%), so we improve the user quality of experience and reduce the energy footprint with a reasonable relative error.This research was funded by the projects Magic P12-TIC1814 and TASOVA MCIU-AEI TIN2017-90644-REDT, by the projects co-financed by FEDER funds HADAS TIN2015-64841-R, MEDEA RTI2018-099213-B-I00 and LEIA UMA18-FEDERJA-157, by the post-doctoral plan of the University of Málaga and the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (KKS) through the research profile Embedded Sensor Systems for Health Plus at Mälardalen University, Sweden. -Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Exploring Emotional Competence: Its effects on coping, social capital, and performance of salespeople

We define emotional competence as a person’s domain-specific working model about how one can appropriately manage one’s emotions within interpersonal situations. Emotional competence is conceived as the integration of seven seemingly unrelated proficiencies: perspective taking, strategic self-presentation of emotions, helping targets of communication accept one’s genuine emotional reactions, lack of guilt when using emotions strategically, fostering self-authenticity, developing an ironic perspective, and incorporating one’s moral code into the self-regulation of emotions. A cluster analysis of responses to measures of the seven proficiencies by 220 salespeople revealed four distinct groups of people. The groups were defined by emotional competence syndromes consisting of combinations of different levels of the seven proficiencies. One group, the highly emotional competent, scored high on all seven proficiencies, a second group scored low on all seven. Two other groups resulted wherein one group was dominated by feelings of guilt in the use of emotions strategically, and the second was characterized by the inability to accept ambiguous and contradictory situations by assuming an ironic perspective. In a test of predictive validity, the highly emotional competent group, but not the others, coped effectively with envy and pride, achieved high social capital, and performed well.coping;emotion regulation;emotional competence;social capital and performance

Between Movement and Platform : Exploring the Sociomateriality of Accountability in Platform Organization and its Performative Consequences

Digital platforms represent a growing disruptive phenomenon. Platforms are engaging since they trace peers, consumers, and citizens, organize social movements, manage distributed innovation, and aid in the governance of cities in terms of distributed agency and autonomy. As different tracing and evaluative infrastructures form and disclose new forms of interaction and trust, platforms give shape to new subjectivities, properties, and relative positions that have not hitherto been defined. This dissertation investigates the emergence of this phenomenon, the accounting practices and infrastructures that underpin this new form of organizing, and possible consequences in terms of accountability that arise in platform organizing. This doctoral dissertation aims to contribute to the understanding of how and where accountability is performed in platform organization. The dissertation draws on different sources from a spiral case study to provide a body of empirical evidence about platformization and accountability. In terms of the approach, the dissertation works under what Orlikowski & Scott (2014) describe as the “broad banner of sociomateriality,” a perspective where materiality is seen as constitutive of all organizational practices. Thus, the dissertation introduces a practice theoretical approach focusing on practice as sociomaterial configuring. The empirical context of the first two papers is sharing economy practices and platforms in Finland. The first paper examines how disruptive activities emerge, while the second considers platform-mediated peer trust in the light of “nordic exceptionalism” and high trust societies. The empirical context of the third paper is Open Innovation platforms. This paper develops a performative theory of openness. Drawing on interview and ethnographic data from an empirical case study of the Smart and Wise City Turku spearhead project, the fourth paper explores the tendency in smart cities initiatives to invest in ICT as a means to “wire up” and make technology “do political work” (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 17). The paper’s central theoretical concept of “thinking infrastructure” highlights how new accounting practices (e.g., on digital platforms) operate by disclosing new worlds where the platforms and the users discover the nature of their responsibilities to the other. When a platform performs accountability, it enables new modalities of distributed agency and distributed authority. When someone or something does not count on a platform, one needs to think critically about the boundaries, constraints, and exclusions that operate through the particular sociomaterial practice of platformization. Through the four empirical research papers and a kappa, this dissertation contributes to understanding how, where and when accountability is performed in platform organization. The findings highlight the sociomateriality of accountability in platform organization and its performative consequences.Digitala plattformar representerar ett växande disruptivt fenomen. Plattformar är intressanta eftersom de gör allt från att spåra användare, konsumenter och medborgare, organisera sociala rörelser, hantera distribuerad innovation och hjälper till att styra städer. När olika spårande och evaluerande digitala infrastrukturer formar och avslöjar nya former av interaktion och tillit, ger plattformar form åt nya subjektiviteter, egenskaper och relativa positioner som hittills inte har definierats. Denna avhandling undersöker uppkomsten av detta fenomen, redovisningspraxis och infrastrukturer som ligger till grund för denna nya form av organisering och möjliga konsekvenser i termer av ansvarsskyldighet som uppstår på plattformar. Det övergripande syftet med denna doktorsavhandling att bidra till förståelsen av hur och var ansvarsskyldighet utförs i plattformorganisation. Avhandlingen bygger på olika källor från en spiralfallsstudie och tillhandahåller en mängd empiriska bevis i relation till begreppen plattform och ansvarsskyldighet. Avhandlingen placerar sig under det som Orlikowski & Scott (2014) beskriver som "sociomaterialitetens breda baner", ett perspektiv där materialitet ses som konstituerande för alla organisatoriska praktiker. Således introducerar avhandlingen ett praktikteoretiskt förhållningssätt som fokuserar på praktiken som sociomateriell konfiguration. Den empiriska kontexten för de två första artiklarna är delningsekonomi och plattformar i Finland. Den första artikeln undersöker hur disruptiva aktiviteter uppstår, medan den andra betraktar plattformsförmedlad tillit i ljuset av "nordisk exceptionalism". Den empiriska kontexten för den tredje artikeln är plattformar för öppen innovation. Denna artikel utvecklar en performativ teori om öppenhet. Med utgångspunkt i intervjuer och etnografiska data från en empirisk fallstudie av spjutspetsprojektet Smart and Wise City Turku undersöker den fjärde artikeln smarta städer och trenden att investera i IKT som ett sätt att "koppla upp" och få teknologi att "göra politiskt arbete” (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, s. 17). Artikelns centrala teoretiska koncept "tänkande infrastruktur" belyser hur nya redovisningsmetoder (t.ex. på digitala plattformar) fungerar genom att avslöja nya världar där plattformarna och användarna upptäcker arten av deras ansvar gentemot den andra. När en plattform fördelar ansvar möjliggör den nya modaliteter för distribuerad handlingskraft och distribuerad auktoritet. När någon eller något inte räknas på en plattform, måste man tänka kritiskt på de gränser, begränsningar och uteslutningar som verkar genom den speciella sociomateriella praktiken plattformisering. Genom de fyra empiriska forskningsartiklarna och en kappa bidrar denna avhandling till att förstå hur, var och när ansvarsskyldighet uppstår i plattformsorganisation. Resultaten belyser den sociomateriella ansvarsfördelningen i plattformsorganisation och dess performativa konsekvenser

Care and the City

Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people’s everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices. This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time