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Journal Articles | 2019

The goblet and two faces: Understanding transcendence and paradox from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta

Shiva Kakkar (FPM)

Human Resource Management International Digest

Purpose

Paradox theory looks at ambidexterity as a set of paradoxical yet interrelated demands. A form of response to such paradoxes is transcendence. Currently, there is limited understanding of the concept among researchers. Using concepts from the Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of transcendence, highlight some of the epistemological challenges it presents and suggest ways in which the concept can be used by practitioners and ambidexterity researchers.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper uses concepts and theories from advaitic episteme to look at concepts of paradox and transcendence. The method of adhyaropa–apavada is introduced as a way to help individuals get a transcendental perspective of paradoxes. The application of the method is demonstrated using secondary data from published research on ambidexterity management.

Findings

It is postulated that transcendence is an “intuitive experience” born out of reflexive thinking. The dialectic of adhyaropa–apavada (affirmation followed by recension) is suggested as a pedagogical tool that can promote reflexive thinking.

Originality/value

The paper significantly adds to the theoretical understanding of paradoxes and transcendence in ambidexterity literature. The paper also makes a strong pedagogical contribution to literature by suggesting the dialectic of adhyaropa–apavada that can be used by managers to promote reflexive thinking among subordinates when faced with paradoxical situations.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Quota-based affirmative action in higher education: Impact on other backward classes in India

Rakesh Basant and Gitanjali Sen

The Journal of Development Studies

While quota-based and other affirmative actions remain on the policy radar of nations faced with social inequalities, there is limited evidence informing policy choices at the national level. This paper estimates the mid-term impact of quota-based affirmative action in higher education (HE) in India implemented from 2008, which mandates that 27 per cent of seats are to be reserved for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) in public funded institutions of HE. Exploiting the differences in participation across social groups, age cohort,s and geographies with varied histories of affirmative action, our triple difference method estimates the impact of the Act by the year 2011–2012. Our results indicate that southern and northcentral states that already had quotas in place for a fairly long period of time, do not contribute much in further expansion of enrolment of OBCs; instead, the eastern region, where such a policy did not exist for long has about 0.12 points improvement in enrolment. Our estimates are robust to different specifications and the impact seems to be non-existent amongst the richest. It suggests that future policy initiatives need to be more nuanced considering regional differences in policy histories, supply of institutions, and extant rates of HE participation of the disadvantaged sections.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Impact of vertical integration on market power in Indian manufacturing sector during the post-reform period

Rakesh Basant and Pulak Mishra

Journal of Industry Competition and Trade

In the context of declining degrees of vertical integration in major industries of Indian manufacturing sector during the post-reform period, the present paper is an attempt to examine how such “vertical disintegration” has affected firms’ market power and its implications for competition policy. Using panel dataset of 49 majors industries of Indian manufacturing sector for the period 2003–04 to 2010–11 and applying the system generalized method of moments approach to estimate of dynamic panel data models, the paper finds that vertical integration does not cause any significant impact on average market power of firms in an industry. Instead, it is influenced by market size, and selling and technology-related efforts. While selling intensity has a positive impact on market power, the impact of market size and technology intensity is found to be negative. Notably, like vertical integration, market concentration, import to export ratio, and capital intensity also do not have any significant impact on market power. The findings of this paper, therefore, have important implications for competition law and policy in general and policies and regulation relating to technology development and international trade in particular.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Exploring the role of urban green spaces in 'smartening' cities in India

Rama Mohana R Turaga, Sandip Chakrabarti, Urmila Jha-Thakur, and Dipita Hossain

Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal

This paper explores the conceptualization of Urban Green Space (UGS) within India’s urban planning process. In doing so, the context of the Smart Cities Mission (SCM), which is a flagship programme for urban transformation in the country, is chosen. We identified four key elements of UGS planning in the literature – quantity, accessibility, multifunctionality, and connectivity. Using this as a framework for analysis, we reviewed the national SCM guidelines and plans of four cities – Gwalior, Bhagalpur, Chandigarh, and Udaipur – in depth. We find that multifunctionality does not feature in the planning of UGS, and the notable absence of a connected, strategic vision suggests the need for strategic-level planning and assessment that goes beyond the project level in India.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Restoration work: Responding to everyday challenges of HIV outreach

Neha Kumar, Azra Ismail, Samyukta Sherugar, and Rajesh Chandwani

Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work CSCW

There has been a growing commitment across the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) towards investigating the design and deployment of technologies in the context of complex healthcare ecologies. We present a qualitative inquiry of one such context, as we examine the outreach practices and everyday challenges of workers at a community-based organization in Gujarat (India) that works with People Living with the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus(PLHIV). Drawing on Yosso's framework of community cultural wealth-apt for such intersectional settings-and the lens of articulation work, we describe how the workers at Vikas build and strengthen varied forms of capital to restore "old normals," or what life was like for their PLHIV clients prior to diagnoses. Finally, we propose that attention to this nature of restoration work, and the workers' engagement with diverse forms of community cultural wealth, allows us to reflect on how technologies might (or might not) be designed to impact social and affective aspects of health.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Leveraging service recovery strategies to reduce customer churn in an emerging market

Sourav Bikash Borah, Srinivas Prakhya, and Amalesh Sharma

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

Building on the properties of emerging markets, we investigate how a firm should align its service recovery strategies with different types of service failure to reduce customer churn in an emerging market. Using resource exchange theory and a multi-method approach, we show that the conventional wisdom related to service recovery needs to be reevaluated in emerging markets. Our results show that process failures lead to a higher likelihood of customer churn compared to outcome failures in emerging markets. Investigating service recovery mechanisms, we find that compensation is more effective in recovering from process failures than in recovering from outcome failures in emerging markets. Similarly, employee behavior has a stronger impact on mitigating the ill effects of process failures than those of outcome failures. The study contributes to the literature on service recovery and resource exchange theory and provides managerial insights for the effective management of customer churn due to service failures in emerging markets.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Understanding the structural characteristics of a firm's whole buyer–supplier network and its impact on international business performance

Amalesh Sharma, V. Kumar, Jun Yan, Sourav Bikash Borah, and Anirban Adhikary

Journal of International Business Studies

Building on the network theory and the concept of organizational ambidexterity, we investigate the impact of structural characteristics of a firm’s whole buyer–supplier network: network density, betweenness centralization, and average clustering coefficient on its international business (IB) performance. We also explore the moderating roles of average path length and PageRank centrality. Using a manually-collected dataset and a robust empirical methodology, we find that, while network density is negatively related, betweenness centralization and average clustering coefficient have an inverted U-shape and a U-shaped relationship with IB performance, respectively. We also find significant moderation effects, and, in the process, we show the economic importance of firms’ whole buyer–supplier network to their IB performance. We contribute to the international business and whole buyer–supplier network literature.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Is it too complex? The curious case of supply network complexity and focal firm innovation

Amalesh Sharma, Surya Pathak, Sourav Borah, and Anirban Adhikary

Journal of Operations Management

Firms have increasingly relied on their supply network for improving their innovation performance. Although the relationship between the supply network structure and innovation has been investigated, the link between supply network complexity and a firm's innovation remains unexplored. By employing transaction cost economics and the concept of a recombinatory search, we propose that the complexity dimensions (horizontal, vertical, and spatial complexity) of a supply network impact the innovation performance of a firm and that such relationships are moderated by a strategic emphasis on value creation and the influence of the firm over the supply network. With a large-scale network data of 201 firms across six industries and 20 countries, we take a robust empirical approach that accounts for endogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity and intrafirm error correlation to test our theory. We find strong support for a nonlinear relationship (with diminishing growth) between both horizontal and vertical complexity with respect to innovation performance. We find that spatial complexity is negatively related to innovation performance. Additionally, we find that a firm's strategic emphasis and its influence indeed moderates the link between the complexity dimensions and innovation performance. Based on our findings, we offer specific managerial guidance for the effective implementation of sourcing practices.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Celebrity endorsements in emerging markets: Align endorsers with brands or with consumers?

Subhadip Roy, Abhijit Guha, Abhijit Biswas, and Dhruv Grewal

Journal of International Business Studies

This paper investigates country-of-origin (CO) effects as they relate to celebrity endorsements. Across multiple studies in emerging markets, the authors show that consumers’ evaluations depend on the match between (1) celebrity CO and consumer CO (termed consumer CO fit), and (2) celebrity CO and brand CO (termed brand CO fit). If there is a trade-off between consumer CO fit and brand CO fit, the authors identify contingencies (e.g., ethnocentrism levels) that determine which type of CO fit leads to higher evaluations. Furthermore, the authors develop prescriptions for segmentation in emerging markets and specify when these prescriptions differ from those prescribed by prior international business research.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Developing an emic scale to measure ad-evoked nostalgia in a collectivist emerging market, India

Subhadip Roy, Varsha Jain, Altaf Merchant, and John B Ford

Journal of Business Research

Although there has been recent interest in the measurement of advertising-evoked nostalgia, the dimensionality and generalizability of the related scales are restricted to the national/cultural boundaries of Western nations. In the present study, we develop an emic scale to measure ad-evoked personal nostalgia in an important emerging economy, India, refining and purifying the scale with seven separate studies (with a combined sample size of 1823). The resulting scale contains five dimensions: past imagery, physiological reactions, positive emotions, negative emotions and collective nostalgia. In the present study, we follow rigorous scale development procedures, and we also go beyond by comparing the effectiveness of our emic scale with a previous scale developed in France (etic), and subsequently we test our measure in another (culturally-congruent) market – Bangladesh. Our study emphasizes the need for culture-specific measures (emic), and we present important theoretical and managerial insights.

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