Call for Papers · Guest Editorship
Integrating HR and Marketing Perspectives on Work, Innovation, and Consumer Experience
A Special Issue of Administrative Sciences (MDPI) · Guest Editor: Prof. Dr. Zheni Wang
Abstracts due
30 November 2026
Send a title and a 300–500 word abstract to the Guest Editor for a scope check before writing.
Full manuscripts due
30 August 2027
Double-anonymized peer review. Accepted papers publish continuously as soon as they are ready.
Algorithmic systems are reshaping how organizations manage employees, interact with consumers, allocate resources, evaluate performance, and make operational decisions. In the workplace, algorithmic management — the use of data-driven systems to organize, assign, monitor, supervise, and evaluate work — has moved well beyond digital labor platforms and is now embedded in conventional workplaces and HRM practice. In parallel, AI is transforming marketing through customer analytics, segmentation and targeting, personalization, recommendation, automated service, and customer relationship management.
These two developments have been studied almost entirely apart. HRM and organizational research asks how algorithms affect employees through monitoring, performance management, task allocation, autonomy, control, fairness, and the employment relationship. Marketing and consumer research asks how algorithms shape customer experience, personalized targeting, dynamic pricing, trust, and responses to automated decision-making. The separation obscures an organizational reality: employees and consumers are interconnected stakeholders, and the same algorithmic infrastructure often governs both.
This Special Issue treats that connection as the object of study. The systems that structure employees' work simultaneously shape service delivery and consumer evaluation, while consumer ratings, complaints, and purchasing behavior feed back into algorithmic performance management. Controlling systems can erode employee autonomy and service innovation, producing negative consumer responses that raise employee pressure further. Supportive systems can enable discretion and innovative service, producing positive consumer responses that reinforce engagement. Employee and consumer outcomes are not independent consequences of organizational algorithms — they are interdependent parts of one algorithmically mediated system.
How can organizations design and govern algorithmic systems that generate innovation and organizational value while supporting the well-being, autonomy, fairness, trust, and agency of employees and consumers?
The central question of this Special IssueTopics welcomed
These topics are indicative rather than exhaustive. Empirical work using diverse methodologies is welcome, as are conceptual and theoretical contributions that advance an interdisciplinary understanding of algorithmic management, innovation, consumer experience, and multi-stakeholder well-being.
What this issue contributes
Extends algorithmic-management research beyond control and efficiency toward work design, innovation, and well-being — treating algorithms as work designers that reshape the job resources and demands central to motivation and performance.
Connects algorithmic management with AI-enabled marketing and consumer behavior, conceptualizing them as interconnected organizational processes and opening up research on employee–consumer spillovers and joint value creation.
Advances a multi-stakeholder view of algorithmic governance that asks who these systems create value for, under what conditions, through what mechanisms, and at what cost — rather than judging them on efficiency or predictive accuracy alone.
Interdisciplinary theorizing is welcome, including but not limited to:
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously or be under consideration elsewhere, with the exception of conference proceedings papers. Research articles, review articles, and short communications are all invited. Administrative Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal; the article processing charge is 1,600 CHF.
Keywords
Guest Editor
Professor of Management, School of Business, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT 06515, USA
Research interests: motivation · leadership · HRM · cross-cultural management
Previously guest edited
A Special Issue of Behavioral Sciences (MDPI) that closed in November 2025 with fifteen published papers on motivation, engagement, and psychological health at work.
See the issue and its papers →