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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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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

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

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

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

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

Grade configuration is associated with school-level standardized test pass rates for sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students

Marisa Malone, Dewey G Cornell, and Kathan Shukla

School Effectiveness and School Improvement

Educators and researchers have long debated the best grade configuration grouping for middle grade students. This study examined school-level differences in reading and mathematics standardized test pass rates for students placed in middle schools versus alternative grade configurations. Latent growth modeling was conducted separately for 6th, 7th, and 8th grades across a 3-year sampling period. Sixth-grade pass rates were significantly higher in elementary schools (e.g., Kindergarten–7th grade) than in middle schools for reading (78.9% vs. 72.0%) and mathematics (82.5% vs. 76.3%). Seventh-grade pass rates in elementary schools were also significantly higher than in middle schools for reading (78.5% vs. 75.9%) and mathematics (83.1% vs. 69.2%). Eighth-grade pass rates were significantly higher in middle schools than in high schools (e.g., 8th–12th grade) for both subjects (74.7% vs. 70.0% for reading, 63.3% vs. 52.0% for mathematics). These findings suggest that students benefit from remaining in elementary school through at least 7th grade.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Innovations in public administration in India

Dipti Gupta, Ashok Kumar Pandey, and Amit Garg

Economic & Political Weekly

Innovations in public service could be a core driver for ensuring that public administration becomes competitive, efficient, cost-effective and accountable to the citizenry. This state of innovation in India is analysed through the Prime Minister’s Awards for Excellence in Public Administration for the period 2005–06 to 2016–17. The analysis shows that most of the innovations are management innovations, followed by technological innovations. They indicate some degree of direction in good governance and replicability. There is also need for some scouting mechanism for public administration innovations and for providing a replicable yet flexible template to promote them across the country.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Downstream electric utility restructuring and upstream generation efficiency: Productivity dynamics of Indian coal and gas-based electricity generators

Anish Sugathan Anish Sugathan, Deepak Malghan, S Chandrashekar, and Deepak K. Sinha

Energy

This paper investigates the producer-level temporal dynamics of total factor productivity and operational performance changes in coal- and gas-based generators during the 2000–20013 period of major structural reforms in the downstream utilities in India. The total factor productivity is estimated using a recently developed improvement in the Stochastic Frontier panel method that controls for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, and the productivity change is decomposed into components of changes in technology frontier, efficiency, scale and allocation. A unique dataset of station-level data for coal and gas plants, that represents about two-thirds of all power generation in India during this period, is constructed for the analysis. The study shows that while there is improvement in the coal generator productivity at the mean rate of 0.20% per year that converges towards a point of higher efficiency for most plants, the gas generators show a trend of stagnant efficiency and declining total factor productivity at the mean rate of −0.80% per year. Unbundling and multi-dimensional utility reform indices are significantly associated with improvement in thermal efficiency and capacity utilization for coal generators. In contrast, utility reforms shows no significant positive influence on gas generators, instead a decline in capacity utilization is observed following unbundling.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Supporting and sustaining state-initiated women's empowerment: Learning from a national programme in India

Ankur Sarin and Vijaya Sherry Chand

Journal of International Development

State-led women's empowerment initiatives are usually indifferent to the tensions between the processes of transformation they initiate at the grassroots and the intermediary support structures they create to sustain empowerment. Drawing on the experiences of Mahila Samakhya, a programme initiated by the Indian state in the late 1980s, we argue that the failure of the state to acknowledge the struggles of the intermediary layers to reconcile the social purpose of transformation with the economic logic underpinning organizational survival only leads to reinforcing a new form of ‘neo-liberal compatible’ governance. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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