Nadine, a receptionist, greets tourists in Singapore: “Hello, nice to see you!”. Nadine remembers all of your past conversations with her, and utilizes that knowledge to improve your service experience. But Nadine is not a super human; she is an android. New machine learning methods and faster computers enable robots to develop artificial intelligence. As a result, they can already remind patients of medication, coach patients and communicate with healthcare professionals. The rise of autonomous devices and other emerging technologies is not only fascinating but relevant. For instance, programmatic advertising is already a US 15 billion dollar market in which software decides which advertisement is shown to whom without ever speaking to a human being. This is no longer science fiction. Yet, business and management scholars have not paid attention to what robotization means for theories of marketing or international business.
While market-as-practice approach and service-dominant (S-D) logic literature provide insightful lenses for understanding how markets are (re)formed and how nonhuman resources and technology partake in the process, these views still remain human-centric, and are limited by phenomenological research tradition in understanding human behavior and experience. The implicit role of technology in markets is a problem, because technology mediates our behavior and interpretation of the world. In the world of robots and autonomous devices, scholars need to develop concepts, theories, and philosophical approaches that enable studying the more active role of technological artifacts in markets and marketing.
Yesterday, I received really good news regarding near future. The Academy of Finland granted me a 3-year post-doc funding (2018-2021) to study the roles of technology in the reformation of markets. The objective is achieved through seven peer-reviewed scientific articles that are written during the project. The articles challenge the current understanding of things and technology in markets and marketing. In these studies, I build on market shaping literature, S-D logic, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and postphenomenological philosophy to discuss how material culture influences the construction of markets.
While this may be good news to me and to the department, I realize this may be bad news to my students in the course “Business Intelligence and the Global Business Environment” (KV2). Second year students are already now forced to think how embedding foresight in business intelligence could help companies in market creation/shaping. While this may already be rather challenging when BI needs to be combined with futures research and market shaping literature, just think about the next cohort, who needs to add ANT and postphenomenological philosophy to all that to pass the course.
While the future brings more challenging courses, I am not concerned that the quality of teaching would not meet the requirements of the students, as I am sure that I am soon replaced by Nadine, a personal learning coach, who knows your personal learning preferences, gives feedback on spot, and has instant access to all peer-reviewed research. While I may still be around teaching during my post-doc project, it is an interesting question how technologies are going to shape higher education over next decade or two. I suggest we all discuss this light question in our Vappu (First of May) festivities.
So, please share the summaries of your discussions below.
Valtteri Kaartemo
University teacher
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