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849 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2017

Normative underpinnings of direct employee participation studies and implications for developing ethical reflexivity: A multidisciplinary review

George Kandathil and Jerome Joseph

Journal of Business Ethics

This paper seeks to join studies which have drawn attention to the ethical reflexivity of research and the research enterprise in the organisational studies’ field. Towards this end, we review OB, HRM, and IR studies on direct employee participation in organisations post-1990s to examine their normative underpinnings. Using Fox’s (Industrial sociology and industrial relations. Research Paper 3, Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, HMSO, London, 1966, Beyond contract: Work, power and trust relations. Faber and Faber, London, 1974) three frames—unitarist, pluralist, and radical—we compare the underpinnings within and across the chosen disciplines to bring ethical reflexivity to studies in this area of inquiry. Implications are drawn out to take forward the quest for more ethically reflexive employee participation research.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Child labour and human capital in developing countries - a multi-period stochastic model

Indrajit Thakurta and Errol D'Souza

Economic Modelling

This study investigates the co-determination of child labour and human capital acquisition through a life cycle model. It explores three categories of households with zero, ten and fifteen years' education of household heads who also have differential access to financial markets. Results show that financially excluded, uneducated households prefer assets with negative returns over human capital investments in their offspring, and hence fall into an intergenerational poverty trap. Their educational investments begin only after an income threshold is reached and the same may be funded through transfers or withdrawal of educational subsidies from college educated households without lowering their human capital investments. Educational subsidies and higher access to educational inputs work best for middle educated households who have higher demand for education. For policy analysis, this study quantifies the contributions of income support, financial inclusion, lower uncertainty and subsidised education in reducing the supply of child labour.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Professionalizing a religio-centric firm through workplace learning

Anamika Sinha, Biju Varkkey, Rajesh Kikani, and Priyanka Dave

Vikalpa

On a Monday morning, after a three-week holiday in Brazil, Rakesh Patel, Chairman of Steel Tubes and Pipes Ltd (STPL), was consolidating his thoughts on the tasks ahead. He was back to work after his first family holiday in many years. Experiencing lovely beaches, football fever, and a leisurely cruise in the Amazon basin had rejuvenated the family. He too was recharged, and ready to take his medium-sized company into, as they say, the next orbit.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Convergence or Divergence: The impact of globalization on employee relations in India and China

Jatinder Kumar Jha and Biju Varkkey

International Journal of Employment Studies

This paper explores the underlying principles of employee relations and the pattern of their evolution in India and China, in the context of globalisation. Globalisation has deeply influenced the way economies function and altered the national patterns of employee relations. Using evidences from available extant literature, we mapped the approaches taken by both India and China to highlight the impact of globalisation on employee relations and found that competition, followed by globalisation, and changes in the trade union structures, have prompted the introduction of the 'human' element to employee relations practices, particularly at the enterprise level; besides, a lucid convergence in employee relations patterns is also witnessed, alongside some divergences in the approaches. The points of convergence include the introduction of the human element in employee relations, labour flexibility, reduction in union membership and increased focus on individual employment contracts. Divergence is primarily witnessed in the degree of involvement of trade unions and governments in employee relations. The differences in patterns observed between the countries can be attributed to the unique institutional factors of each country.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Contribution of HR systems in development of ethical climate at workplace: A case study

Jatinder Kumar Jha, Biju Varkkey, Praveen Agrawal, and Narendra Singh

South Asian Journal of Human Resource Management

This article elucidates the relationship between HR systems and ethical climate at workplace with primary focus on the procedure adopted for development of ethical climate, using case study of an Indian power distribution company (Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited [TPDDL]). The study categorizes TPDDL’s endeavours undertaken into two categories, explicit and implicit initiatives. Explicit ways of promoting ethics include ethics trainings, seminars on ethics, rewards and punishment policy, and mechanism of reporting ethical concerns/issues (ethics portal, whistle blower policy, IVRS, etc.). Implicit ways of creating ethical climate include HR practices, namely selective selection, training for developing interpersonal and technical skills, fair performance appraisal system and various engagement initiatives. The support and guidance of the senior management and line managers ensured successful execution of both initiatives. Results from the study suggest, over the period of time, the untiring efforts of various actors that saw the development of an ethical climate.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Professionalizing religious family-owned organizations: An examination of human resource challenges

Anamika Sinha, Jatin Pandey, and Biju Varkkey

South Asian Journal of Management

Transformation of the Human Resource (HR) function from the traditional to a modern and professional one continues to be a challenge for most family-owned organizations. This paper discusses the traditional HR practices followed in an Indian religious family-owned organization, the actions taken during the transformation process of professionalizing the firm and the challenges faced by the newly recruited HR head while executing this process, along with the change management schema adopted for professionalization. During this process, deeply-rooted traditions prevalent in the firm had to be a balanced with a need for modernization. A steady approach with small steps at a time-rather than a radical transformation at a fast pace-was adopted for the change process. The intention of the professionalization process was not to harm or do away with the inherent good people-management practices that already existed but build upon them. At the same time, practices and styles had to be changed, and concerns of employees addressed. The paper also brings forth the impact of owner/promoter's religious beliefs on the organizational and also opens avenues for future research on the relatively unexplored domains of religion and management. We discuss a three-pronged plan comprising of overall strategy development, tuning the HR systems to meet transformation goals and building a new professional culture. The paper adds to the existing theory and practice by proposing the secularization matrix for managing transformation in such organizations.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Emergence of distributed coordination in Kolkata Paise Restaurant problem with finite information

Diptesh Ghosh and Anindya S. Chakrabarti

Physica: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

In this paper, we study a large-scale distributed coordination problem and propose efficient adaptive strategies to solve the problem. The basic problem is to allocate finite number of resources to individual agents in the absence of a central planner such that there is as little congestion as possible and the fraction of unutilized resources is reduced as far as possible. In the absence of a central planner and global information, agents can employ adaptive strategies that uses only a finite knowledge about the competitors. In this paper, we show that a combination of finite information sets and reinforcement learning can increase the utilization fraction of resources substantially.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Transnational Indian business in the twentieth century

Chinmay Tumbe

Business History Review

This article argues that migration and investment from India moved in tandem to chart the evolution of transnational Indian business in the twentieth century, first toward Southeast Asia and Africa and later toward the United States, Europe, and West Asia. With a focus on the banking and diamond sectors, the overseas investment project of the Aditya Birla Group, and the transnational linkages of India's one hundred richest business leaders, the article locates important events, policies, and actors before economic liberalization in 1991 that laid the foundation for subsequent globalization of Indian firms.

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Journal Articles | 2017

A stochastic model for the throughput analysis of passing dual yard cranes

Suruchika Saini, Debjit Roy, and Rene De Koster

Computers & Operations Research

New container terminal technologies such as passing dual yard cranes per stack promise increase in stacking throughput capacity. However, dual yard cranes can interfere, which reduces the cranes’ throughput capacity. Using crane operational protocols, we develop a stochastic model for two passing dual yard cranes and obtain closed-form expressions for the crane throughput capacity with interference delays. We then develop an approximate model to estimate the expected throughput times for both balanced and unbalanced stack configuration. A detailed discrete-event simulation is built to validate the analytical model. We show that interference effects between the cranes can reduce the crane throughput capacity by an average of 35% and interference delays increase with an increase in the number of bays in the stack. We use the model to develop operational insights.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Determinants of safe and productive truck driving: empirical evidence from long-haul cargo transport.

Jelle de Vries, Rene De Koster, Serge Rijsdijk, and Debjit Roy

Transportation Research Part E-Logistics and Transportation Review,

Using GPS data of 370 long-haul trips in India, survey data of 49 truck drivers, and ERP data, this study examines the role of driver personality characteristics in predicting risky and productive driving. The results show that more conscientious drivers display more risky driving behavior. More extravert drivers are less productive, whereas driver safety consciousness positively relates to productivity. These results can serve as a starting point for further studies into how long-haul transport companies may use individual truck driver characteristics in their training and selection procedures to meet operational safety and productivity objectives.

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