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3848 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2017

Institutional discourses and ascribed disability identities

Mukta Kulkarni, K.V.Gopakumar, and Devi Vijay

IIMB Management Review,

In the present study we asked: how do institutional discourses, as represented in mass media such as newspapers, confer identities upon a traditionally marginalised collective such as those with a disability? To answer our question, we examined Indian newspaper discourse from 2001 to 2010, the time period between two census counts. We observed that disability identities—that of a welfare recipient, a collective with human rights, a collective that is vulnerable, and that engages in miscreancy—were ascribed through selective highlighting of certain aspects of the collective, thereby socially positioning the collective, and through the associated signalling of institutional subject positions. Present observations indicate that identities of a collective can be governed by institutional discourse, that those “labelled” can themselves reinforce institutionally ascribed identities, and that as institutional discourses confer identities onto the marginalised, they simultaneously also signal who the relatively more powerful institutional actors are.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Does school climate mean the same thing in the United States as in Mexico? A focus on measurement invariance

Kathan D. Shukla, Tracy E. Waasdorp, Sarah Lindstrom Johnson, Mercedes Gabriela Orozco Solis, Amanda J. Nguyen, Cecilia Colunga Rodríguez, and Catherine P. Bradshaw

Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment

School climate is an important construct for guiding violence prevention efforts in U.S. schools, but there has been less consideration of this concept in its neighboring country Mexico, which has a higher prevalence of violence. The U.S. Department of Education outlined a three-domain conceptualization of school climate (i.e., safe and supportive schools model) that includes engagement, safety, and the school environment. To examine the applicability of this school climate model in Mexico, the present study tested its measurement invariance across middle school students in the United States (n = 15,099) and Mexico (n = 2,211). Findings supported full invariance for engagement and modified-safety scales indicating that factor loadings and intercepts contributed almost equally to factor means, and scale scores were comparable across groups. Partial invariance was found for the environment scales. Results of a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) consisting of all 13 school climate scales indicated significantly positive associations among all scales in the U.S. sample and among most scales in the Mexico sample. Implications of these findings are discussed.

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Journal Articles | 2017

An orchestrated negotiated exchange: Trading home-based telework for intensified work

George Mathew Kandathil and Dharma Raju Bathini

Journal of Business Ethics

In this paper, we explore a popular flexible work arrangement (FWA), home-based telework, in the Indian IT industry. We show how IT managers used the dominant meanings of telework to portray telework as an employee benefit that outweighed the attendant cost—intensified work. While using their discretion to grant telework, the managers drew on this portrayal to orchestrate a negotiated exchange with their subordinates. Consequently, the employees consented to accomplish the intensified work at home in exchange of telework despite their opposition to the intensified work in the office. Thus, whereas the extant studies consider work intensification as an unanticipated outcome of using FWAs, we show how firms may use FWAs strategically to get office-based intensified work accomplished at home. While the dominant argument is that employees reciprocate the opportunity to telework with intensified work, we show a discursively orchestrated negotiation that favors management. A corrective policy measure is to frame telework as an employee right.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Negotiating absent practices and dormant features: discourse as a means of shaping the implementation of a global enterprise system to meet local work culture

George Kandathil and Erica L. Wagner

2017 CHI Conference

The introduction of a new enterprise system to an organization often necessitates the accommodation of standardized practices, which may be in conflict with local users' practices and their work culture. We explore such a conflict in an India-based multinational organization using an eight-month interpretive case study. Based on grounded analysis, we present a narrative account of how consultants, on contract for managing the deployment and making necessary adjustments, used discourse as a means of shaping user understanding about the features and practices embedded in the underlying system, which were not initially realized through the interface. Sustained user resistance to this shaping led to a negotiated compromise and adaptation of the system to incorporate local work culture. Our findings allow us to explore the under-theorized role of discursive power within an implementer-user-technology trio, and illustrate the feedback utility of user resistance in developing culturally-inclusive designs.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Technology non-affordances: The political interactions in the designer-user-technology trio in a developing country

George Kandathil and Erica Wagner

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings

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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

A two-step latent profile method for identifying invalid respondents in self-reported survey data

Kathan D. Shukla and Timothy Konold

Journal of Experimental Education

Insincere respondents can have an adverse impact on the validity of substantive inferences arising from self-administered questionnaires (SAQs). The current study introduces a new method for identifying potentially invalid respondents from their atypical response patterns. The two-step procedure involves generating a response inconsistency (RI) score for each participant and scale on the SAQ and subjecting the resulting scores to latent profile analysis to identify classes of atypical RI respondent profiles. The procedure can be implemented post–data collection and is illustrated through a survey of school climate that was administered to N = 52,102 high school students. Results of this screening procedure revealed high levels of specificity and expected levels of concordance when contrasted with the results of traditionally used methods of screening items and response time. Contrasts between valid and invalid respondents revealed similar patterns across the three screening procedures when compared across external measures of academics and risk behaviors.

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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

Tests of independence for $2 \times 2$ contingency table with random margins

Yuan Yu, Dhiman Bhadra, and Balgobin Nandram

International Journal of Statistics and Probability

Fisher's exact test is commonly used for testing the hypothesis of independence between the row and column variables in a $r \times c$ contingency table. It is a ``small-sample'' test since it is used when the sample size is not large enough for the Pearsonian chi-square test to be valid. Fisher's exact test conditions on both margins of a $2 \times 2$ table leading to a hypergeometric distribution of the cell counts under independence. Moreover, it is conservative in the sense that its actual significance level falls short of the nominal level. In this paper, we modify Fisher's exact test by lifting the restriction of fixed margins and allow the margins to be random. In doing so, we propose two new tests - a likelihood ratio test in a frequentist framework and a Bayes factor test in a Bayesian framework, both of which are based on a new multinomial distributional framework. We apply the three tests on data from the Worcester Heart Attack study and compare their power functions in assessing gender difference in the therapeutic management of patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI).

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