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This article explores memory work and storytelling as an organising tool through family histories, offering theoretical and methodological implications and extending existing conceptualisations of memory work as a feminist method. This approach is termed as impressionist memory work.

To illustrate impressionistic memory work in action, the article presents two family histories set during Second World War and invite the reader to engage in the “undoing” of these stories and dominant ways of knowing through storytelling. This method challenges the taken-for-granted roles, plots and detail of family histories to uncover the obscured or silenced stories within, together with feminine, affective and embodied subjectivities, marginalisation and social inequalities.

This study argues that impressionistic memory work as a feminist method can challenge the silencing and gendering of experiences in co-constructed and co-interpreted narratives (both formal and informal ones).

This study shows that engagement with impressionistic memory work can challenge taken-for-granted stories with prominent male actors and masculine narratives to reveal the female actors and feminine narratives within. This approach will offer a more inclusive perspective on family histories and deeper engagement with the marginalised or neglected actors and aspects of our histories.

Despite the proliferation of work–family research, a thorough understanding of family role status changes (e.g. the gaining of elder or child caregiving responsibilities) remain under-theorized and under-examined. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize various forms of family role status changes and examine the ways in which these changes influence various employee outcomes.

Data were collected as part of the work–family health study. Using a longitudinal, three-wave study with two-time lags of 6 months (n = 151 family role status changes; n = 392 individuals with family role stability), this study uses one-way analysis of variance to compare mean differences across groups and multilevel modeling to examine the predictive effects of family role status changes.

Overall, experiences of employees undergoing a family role status change did not differ significantly from employees whose family role status remained stable over the same 12-month period. Separation/divorce predicted higher levels of family-to-work conflict.

The work raises important considerations for organizational science and human resource policy research to better understand the substantive effects of family role status changes on employee well-being.

The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will bring opportunities for a wide range of innovations that have the potential to dramatically change service industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future and to advance a research agenda for service researchers.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, robotics and AI literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts their features and capabilities with those of frontline employees, and provides an understanding for which types of service tasks robots will dominate and where humans will dominate. Second, this paper examines consumer perceptions, beliefs and behaviors as related to service robots, and advances the service robot acceptance model. Third, it provides an overview of the ethical questions surrounding robot-delivered services at the individual, market and societal level.

This paper helps service organizations and their management, service robot innovators, programmers and developers, and policymakers better understand the implications of a ubiquitous deployment of service robots.

This is the first conceptual paper that systematically examines key dimensions of robot-delivered frontline service and explores how these will differ in the future.