The manufacturing sector needs to focus on social, environmental and technological factors to integrate Industry 4.0 in production planning, logistics and supply chains. Technical Education Institutes (TEIs) can play a key role in achieving this ambition as they are responsible for the workforce of the digital future. To this end, a learning factory is often referred to as a realistic manufacturing environment. However, the existing research regarding the successful adoption of a learning factory based on Industry 4.0 is scant in the literature. We, therefore, aim to address this research gap by examining key factors that affect the decision to adopt Industry 4.0 in technical education institutes. We have adopted the theoretical lens of the Technology-Organisation-Environment (T-O-E) framework to study industry 4.0 adoption in TEIs. The findings based on 134 valid responses from TEIs in India indicate that the organisational dimension is critical in determining whether or not to adopt Industry 4.0. Our study shows that top management support, internal resources, and the capabilities of the teaching staff are vital for the adoption of Industry 4.0. Additionally, our findings indicate that significant differences exist between public and private TEIs concerning the adoption of Industry 4.0. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Purpose: Ports handle a significant portion of international cargo, so the performance of ports plays a major role in the economic development of a country. This paper aims to study how port performance depends on various interdependent factors and how it requires a holistic approach, which accounts for all the necessary criteria that contribute to the overall efficiency and performance. Design/methodology/approach: An integrated fuzzy DEMATEL-TOPSIS approach with an objective to evaluate the operational capability and financial performance of the ports is proposed. A case study is presented with an analysis of the major South Indian ports to assess port operational performance and evaluate various financial ratios to assess financial performance. Findings: Through a review of the literature and based on the inputs from experts, six criteria affecting the operational performance and six financial criteria were identified. The debt coverage ratios turned out to be the most important, while the liquidity ratios were the least important. The six operational criteria have almost similar importance. The final results indicate a consistent overall performance by the Ennore Port, except during one financial year. Practical implications: The proposed solution approach helps to identify and concentrate on the criteria that affect port performance. It will also help to evaluate and understand the dynamics involved in the performance of ports. Originality/value: This work highlights the key measurable operational and financial criteria that affect the efficiency of ports. The integrated fuzzy DEMATEL-TOPSIS approach provides a better way to evaluate and benchmark port performance. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Documented cases of sustainable initiatives of firms show that green efforts in one market often have spillover effects on other markets. The critical question is, how do firms harness and respond to such market spillovers. To answer this, the paper examines two settings where, a firm operates in two different markets with spillovers and secondly, where it faces marketplace competition. Spillovers can be positive or negative. Using an analytical approach, the paper examines pricing and greening strategies of a firm in these scenarios, conducts market comparisons, and examines specific conditions where the firm may not invest in greening. The findings show that under the threat of spillovers from competitor's green efforts, a focal firm increases its greening efforts and prices. Further, the absence of consumer green sensitivity in the primary market does not deter a firm from greening, if spillovers exist. Under negative spillovers, a firm can still invest in positive green efforts if the negative spillover effect is below a threshold. However, under competitive threat, a firm may lose competitive advantage as its competitor (with positive green spillovers), increases its greening efforts to compete in both the markets. © 2021

This article examines the evolutionary history of coolie labourers and the Maistries in the plantations of colonial Madras Presidency in South India during the nineteenth century. The post-emancipation era in colonial India witnessed the growth of planting industries and several phases of migration of coolies to the overseas and domestic plantations. By focussing on coolie migration, particularly the recruitment, settlement and management practices in the coffee plantations of South India, this article argues that the capitalist entrepreneurs intentionally used indigenous socio-political and cultural forms and incorporated the traditional authorities in controlling and managing the estates. The intermediaries between the planters and the coolies used the traditional domains of caste, patriarchy, religion, group, locality, indebtedness, and vulnerability to recruit and employ the labourers in the plantations. The article points to the 'continued indebtedness' of the coolies through advance payment mechanisms and the birth of a coercive supervising authority in the South Indian colonial plantations during the nineteenth century. The article also argues that in due course of plantation development, the coolie recruitment and the engagement of the Maistries became the domains of colonial governmental intervention through new forms of writing practices and the collection of vital statistics of the coolies. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Student engagement is critical to creating a collaborative and involved learning environment. The pandemic brought the class room engagement between the faculty and the students to a halt. We tried to find different avenues for the students to reach out to the faculty and to have an open forum to facilitate discussions among themselves. This approach helped us in increasing engagement and also allowed students who would normally not speak during the class hours to contribute to the overall learning during the course. JEL Codes: I20, I23, I29. © 2022 XLRI Jamshedpur, School of Business Management & Human Resources.

A platoon is a set of virtually linked vehicles that drive closely behind one another. Truck platooning is a fast-emerging application of connected and autonomous vehicles to help tackle the traditional problems of the transportation industry and to reduce cost and minimise emissions. In this study, we present a departure time coordination-based heuristic solution for platoon formations. We also use a comprehensive modal emission model to understand the influence of velocity and size of the platoon on fuel savings potential. We compare the heuristic’s performance on the different variants of the platooning problem in the literature with a central platoon coordinator and analyse the impact of the type of vehicle, speed, load and size of the platoon on the fuel savings potential of platooning. Numerical analysis shows a fuel savings potential of 6.4% to 8% for a platoon size of three with heavy duty vehicles at 80 kmph for different configurations. Copyright © 2022 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Purpose: The present study aims to investigate the direct and indirect relationship between abusive supervision (AS) and employees’ intention to quit (ITQ) and employee misconduct (EM). Though the direct relationship was investigated in past studies; however, the indirect effect of the said relationships via workplace ostracism (WO) and the interaction effect of resilience on the direct relationship based on the conservation of resource theory and social exchange theory were hardly explored. Design/methodology/approach: The data was collected through a cross-sectional survey using standardized measures. In the current study, the responses from 575 respondents were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses. Findings: The study’s findings stressed that AS positively affects an employee’s ITQ and EM. WO was found to be a significant mediator and resilience as a significant moderator for AS, ITQ and EM relationships. Originality/value: The study is one of the few studies in the Indian context linking AS to ITQ and EM in the presence of WO as a mediator and resilience as a moderator. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the linkage between cyberbullying and depression. Using the multi-mediation routes this study also explores the cyberbullying-depression relationship via helplessness and self-esteem. This study is a multi-mediation model with a sample size of 340 respondents. The study draws cross-sectional data from respondents from diverse industry backgrounds ranging from information technology, education, banking, and retail. Partial least square (PLS-SEM) was used for the analysis. Using the cognitive theory of depression, results showed that cyberbullying is positively related to depression. Also, the study found that helplessness and self-esteem mediate the linkage between cyberbullying and depression. The study is unique as perhaps for the first time the multi mediation mechanism has been studied in the relationship of cyberbullying and depression. Drawing from helplessness/ hopelessness theory, the study has conceptualized and tested cyberbullying as a stressor that triggers various adverse cognitions which have been tested in multi-mediational route. The study highlights several issues emerging with the increased use of the internet and the severe abusive behaviour in form of cyberbullying. There is a need for organizations and managers to have specific actions to reduce the tendency of helplessness and low self-esteem due to cyberbullying to control adverse cognition of depression among employees. © 2022 Management Development Institute.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the key factors that motivate learners to use handheld devices to access library resources. To do so, this study integrates the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the DeLone and McLean information systems success (D and M-ISS) model. Design/methodology/approach: The relationship between the causes and the outcomes may not be symmetrical. To test this proposition, data were collected from 210 respondents in a Gulf country and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) and complemented by fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Findings: The SEM results revealed that three constructs – perceived ease of use (PEOU), service quality (SQ) and system quality (SEQ) are strong drivers of students’ continuous intention to use handheld devices to access library resources. However, perceived usefulness (PU) and information quality (IQ) do not significantly influence students’ intentions. Besides, SQ and PEOU are positively related to PU. Furthermore, fsQCA results show that two different conjunctions, PU*PEOU*IQ*SEQ and PEOU*SQ*IQ*SEQ, cause the students to show a continuous intention to use handheld devices to access library resources. Originality/value: Unlike previous studies on mobile library resource utilization, this analysis extends TAM to investigate the linear additive influence of two basic TAM constructs: PEOU and PU, and three constructs, namely, SEQ, SQ and IQ of the ISS model, on students’ library resource utilization. Furthermore, the findings of SEM were complemented by a set theory-based configuration method, fsQCA, to investigate the asymmetrical, equifinal and configurational causation leading to the desired outcome. The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

With the expansion of business education and an increasing focus on diversity, it is imperative that business schools address students’ diverse learning styles. A deeper understanding of how differently each student learns may provide useful insights into “teaching-learning” processes that need to be designed for effective learning. Providing an environment that maximizes learning for each student is the prime motive for understanding students’ learning styles. This study used Kolb’s learning model to understand the differences in learning styles of undergraduate and postgraduate students in management programs. Using data from a leading B-school in India, the study identified the differences in undergraduate and postgraduate students’ learning styles. The study offers insights for developing learning effectiveness by aligning learning styles with pedagogical tools. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This study contributes to the international corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature and emerging market multinationals research by examining the influence of dual institutional embeddedness on home country CSR engagement in the understudied context of Indian multinational enterprises (MNEs). Specifically, we study the role of internationalization, depth of involvement in stringent CSR contexts, and implementation of mandatory CSR regulation in the home country on the domestic CSR engagement of Indian MNEs. Our results indicate that heterogeneous institutional pressures experienced by firms embedded in dual institutional contexts encourage greater home country CSR engagement. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Purpose: Flexible return policies are offered by the manufacturers to encourage the retailers announcing a lenient returns scheme to their customers. Design/methodology/approach: This study considers the distribution of durable products in a supply chain where the demand is sensitive to sales effort and retail price. Using a game theoretic framework, the paper presents an assessment of the strategic effect of flexible returns policy announced by the manufacturer under retail competition and highlights its implications on profitability. Findings: Comparative analysis of monopolistic and duopolistic competition provides a better understanding about the repercussions and related facts on offering a flexible returns policy in these environments. It is profitable for the manufacturer to offer a flexible returns policy when there is retail competition than under monopolistic condition. Practical implications: Practitioners view returns policy offered as an insurance given to the buyers and they infer it to be a better mechanism for doing business. Lenient returns policy promotes the sales by increasing the trust on the retailer and boosts up the perception of quality about the product by lowering the perceived risk for customers. Originality/value: Effective product return strategies such as being lenient in terms of time, money, effort, scope and exchange can result in increased revenues, lower cost and improved profitability to the manufacturer and retailer, at the same time offering an enhanced level of customer service. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an advertising history of Tata Steel from its inception in 1907 to 2007 when it completed 100 years of operation. The authors use postcolonial theory to highlight the intertwining of advertising with the broader project of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nation-building. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a visual analysis of a compilation of advertisements published by Tata Steel to commemorate 100 years of its existence, spanning the years from 1907 to 2007. They also used ads and posters available on the website of the Tata Steel Archives. Published work on Tata Steel such as books and papers provided contextualization. Findings: Advertising creatives, through selective deployment of anticolonial discourses, manage the contradictory pulls of emergent nationalism on the one hand and the pragmatic need to work with the colonial administration on the other. However, such a negotiation leads to moments of slippage, where advertising reinforces colonial tropes. At a broader level, the authors suggest that despite attempts to draw on subversive discourses of resistance used by nationalists, Tata Steel’s advertising is inescapably intertwined with the larger matrix of colonial and capitalist power. Originality/value: This study contributes to a non-Western perspective on advertising history. Further, it provides understanding of the marketing activities of a large corporation, which straddles the colonial and postcolonial era of India, an important economy. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: Organisational researchers have always highlighted the role of leadership during crisis. However, anecdotal evidence shows that leadership often fails when the culture does not back them during a crisis. Hence, actively initiating and developing a culture of excellence (CoE) become all the more relevant during a crisis. This paper aims to understand the role of CoE in building a resilient organisation. Furthermore, it aims to contribute to the understanding of building CoE practices in small businesses. Design/methodology/approach: The paper reviews relevant literature and gathers evidence from VDart Inc, a digital talent management and services firm based in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. A case study design based on retrospective and real-time data collection is performed to investigate CoE practices before and during the Covid-19 crisis. Findings: The findings argue that, most often, the culture and not just the leadership determines the fate of an organisation undergoing crisis. From the case evidence, the authors identify reinforce the culture, invest in cultural custodians, seek order, keep them close and industry thought-leadership (“RISK-It”) CoE practices for fostering resilience in small- and medium-sized enterprises/businesses (SMEs) for managing crises. Originality/value: The authors contribute to knowledge in fostering proactive resilience in small businesses, showing how SMEs should invest in building a CoE when their organisations are stable instead of searching for strong leaders and unique strategies during a crisis. Later, during the crisis, just by reinforcing their CoE using RISK-It CoE practices, leaders and managers would be able to leverage any turbulence to the advantage of their organisations. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Fresh management graduates face daunting challenges in developing their early professional career. They have to shift from espoused learning approach encountered at management schools to enacted practices of learning approach they encounter at work. To bridge gap between these two approaches, this exploratory research work provides insights into developing andragogical learning approach with a focus on self-directed learning. We use self-directed learning and Kolb's experiential learning cycle model for developing the conceptual framework. We intend to carry out the exploratory and qualitative study in three phases. Graduate students, young management executives and senior executives who have the responsibility in recruiting these graduates will be interviewed in each phase. Inductive analysis of the qualitative data will enable us to andragogical learning approach which will reduce the gap between espoused and enacted learning approach. Our study will prepare the management graduates for a successful early professional career. © 2022 by the International Institute of Informatics and Systemics. All rights reserved.

Mobile wallet technology offers the advantages of convenience, flexibility, and lower cost in mobile payments. The current study reviews the mobile wallet literature in different countries in order to investigate drivers and barriers in the usage of mobile wallet in Oman. Open-ended interviews and secondary resources have been employed to identify mobile wallet drivers and barriers, and understand the present status in Oman. Commonly reported barriers in Oman include security, awareness, dedicated merchants, and financial supports. The acceptance and usage of mobile wallet among consumers requires further investigation in particular with respect to developing countries like Oman. This may be one of the first attempts to explore the research conducted in mobile payments across a number of emerging economies and investigate the service provider perception with regards to mobile wallet in Oman. Copyright © 2022 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Purpose (mandatory): The purpose of this paper is to study engagement of employees in informal learning behaviors (ILBs) and to understand the role of workplace support (organizational support, supervisor support and job support) in facilitating such behaviors. Design/methodology/approach (mandatory): The study uses descriptive design with data collected through voluntary non-probability sampling method of 58 employees from India and the USA through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Findings (mandatory): Preliminary findings suggest that 81% of the employees are likely to engage in ILBs and 65.5% agreed to have received workplace support. Employees from India rate their workplace support as higher and are more likely to engage in ILBs than those from the USA. Originality/value (mandatory): This study contributes to workplace informal learning literature and highlights the need for more studies on workforce ILBs across multiple countries and job role variations. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold, first is to conceptualize the role of “psychological danger” and the consequent “interpersonal distrust” as the cause of knowledge hiding in organizations. Second, it proposes the role of “compassion” training to tackle this challenge to knowledge hiding. Thus, the overall idea contributes to the ongoing conversation on knowledge hiding and provides new insights into tackling the same. Design/methodology: This paper uses an integrative review technique to conceptualize the proposed relationships for model development. Extant work on knowledge hiding and its antecedents were reviewed to propose the new antecedents and outline how the compassion training may help combat the challenge posed. A theoretical lens of social exchange theory forms the basis for the proposed relationship. Findings: This study forwards the reasons for knowledge hiding and the ways to tackle it. We observe that “psychological danger” (opposite of psychological safety) might lead to an interpersonal distrust between employees, and this may finally lead to knowledge hiding behavior. This interpersonal transaction leading to hiding behavior could be regulated by the compassion developed in an employee via training. Originality: Although the research on “knowledge hiding” is progressing, there is still a lack of focus on findings answers to the challenges of the way “knowledge hiding” behavior is triggered. This study is unique in its proposal of an organizational intervention of “compassion” to tackle knowledge hiding. Research implications: This study proposes a new set of antecedents to the knowledge hiding behavior. It also conceptualizes a moderated mediation model that could be tested in future research. Future studies may employ an intervention-based experimental or longitudinal survey research to study the proposed relationship. Practical implications: This research takes cognizance of the challenge organizations face due to knowledge hiding behavior and how it degrades the knowledge management systems. It proposes that if employees are provided with compassion training, it may help check the issue of “knowledge hiding.” © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

This research examines the socially significant issue of doctors' resistance to healthcare information technology (HIT) from the radical power perspective. It adopts Bourdieu's social practice theory to examine the interaction of HIT with the reproduction of doctors' historically rooted social standing through the doctor-patient-interaction (D-P-I) practice. Findings from our ethnographic enquiry at a large corporate healthcare organisation in India link doctors' historically rooted social standing to the symbolic recognition of their embodied emotional capital existing in tandem with their habitus. The symbolic recognition of emotional capital provided a better valorisation of clinical capital and allowed the accumulation of other forms of capital—institutionalised capital, social capital and economic capital—that formed doctors' capital structure and contributed to their social status. Doctors produced emotional capital by putting their habitus into practice and, in the process, reproduced its symbolic status and their social status linked to it. HIT challenged doctors to put their habitus into practice, thereby creating a perception of threat to emotional capital. Doctors' HIT resistance was a conservation strategy to reproduce their historically rooted higher social status. Findings from this study contribute to the literature on Power and IT resistance. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Consumer vulnerability (CV) has evolved into an important management research field over the past two decades. The CV field (hereafter, the field) merits evaluation of its present state and prospects, as it incorporates many subthemes. This study used bibliometric analysis to map and make sense of the field. The sample, retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database, consisted of 291 documents published between 2001 and 2021. This study used citation analysis to identify prolific authors, key documents, and sources in the field. Importantly, this article reveals two aspects of the knowledge structure of the field: intellectual structure and conceptual structure. Co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling were used to explain the intellectual structure of the field, consisting of the field's knowledge foundations and research fronts. A thematic analysis of the field was performed using a bi-dimensional thematic map to uncover the conceptual structure of the field. This article identifies the field's basic, motor, niche, and emerging/declining themes. A more nuanced view of the conceptual structure was provided by tracing the chronological thematic evolution of the field. Finally, we discuss future research directions in this field. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.