News

Olivia Hornung accepted at the Doctoral Consortium of HICSS-53 2020

53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 6, 2020, Maui, Hawaii, US

We are pleased that our staff member Olivia Hornung is invited to present her graduation exposé "Personal virtual assistants and the economics of convention: Understanding the employee" at the fourth "HICSS Doctoral Fellows Program and Doctoral Consortium". The renowned Doctoral Consortium will be held on the day before the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-53), which will take place from January 7 to January 10, 2020 at the Grand Wailea on Maui, Hawaii, USA.

Abstract: Personal virtual assistants are demanded to effectively fulfil and support employee’s tasks in organizations. Today, existing personal virtual assistants are mainly limited to take over simple administrative tasks, thus limiting their potential long-term impact employees and organizations as a whole. To overcome this shortcoming, we introduce the pragmatic perspective of the Economics of Conventions (EC) to analyze and understand the employees’ plural motives and behaviors that may explain sustained or fragmented use of personal virtual assistants in organizations. In doing so, we provide a deepened understanding of the success of personal virtual assistants and offer new avenues for future research by calling for a more holistic theoretical foundation of organizational artificial intelligence solutions that consider and represent organizations and their employees in their complexity, respectively their plural orders of worth.