Profit-oriented service sectors such as tourism, hospitality, and entertainment are increasingly looking at how professional service robots can be integrated into the workplace to perform socio-cognitive tasks that were previously reserved for humans. This is a work in which social and labor sciences recognize the principle role of emotions. However, the models and narratives of emotions that drive research, design, and deployment of service robots in human–robot interaction differ considerably from how emotions are framed in the sociology of labor and feminist studies of service work. In this paper, we explore these tensions through the concepts of affective and emotional labor, and outline key insights these concepts offer for the design and evaluation of professional service robots. Taken together, an emphasis on interactionist approaches to emotions and on the demands of affective labor, leads us to argue that service employees are under-represented in existing studies in human–robot interaction. To address this, we outline how participatory design and value-sensitive design approaches can be applied as complimentary methodological frameworks that include service employees as vital stakeholders.
In this paper, through the prism of the notion of workplace identity, we critically reflect on potential challenges of working alongside social service robots in service industries. From feminist studies of workplace identity, we adopt concepts of naturalization and normalization, and discuss how service robots’ “imprisonment” in the role of a friendly and consistent helper may present psychological and political challenges to how service employees relate to and perform their workplace identity.
The application of social robots as motivational tools and companions in education is increasingly being explored from a theoretical and practical point of view. In this paper, we examine the social robot NAO as a Persuasive Educational and Entertainment Robot (PEER) and present findings from a case study on the use of NAO to support learning environments in Danish primary schools.In the case study we focus on the children’s practice of articulation and embodied interaction with NAO and investigate the role of NAO as a ‘tool’, ‘social actor’ or ‘simulating medium’ in the learning designs. We examine whether this categorization is static or dynamic, i. e. develops and changes over the course of the interaction and explore how this relates to and affects the student’s motivation to engage in the NAO-supported learning activities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.