The article deals with intercultural business communication challenges that complicate discourses in multinational organizations. The article explores the cultural incompatibility problems with their corresponding cultural dimensions extracted from the seminal theories of intercultural management to identify training needs for multinational managers. The fulcrum of this work rests on the salient value orientations that lead to communication collapses when managers from different countries fail to accomplish optimal cultural attunement in their narratives and script their conversations with ethnocentric biases. To counter these debilitating stressful intercultural conversations, the author presents an innovative training solution of a “20-20 culture-communication template tool” for coaching managers for effective production of ethno-relative dialogues across diverse geo-cultural economies. This culture tool uses a 20-point culture questionnaire format with the complementary application apparatus of 20 culture sensitivity programs that organizations can undertake for a quick tutoring of multinational managers for forging successful intercultural coalitions in plural work spaces. © 2023 by the Association for Business Communication.

The paper addresses the problem of extant rural–urban divide regarding access to quality education and training and describes a sustainable social entrepreneurial model using social technologies (Social technology is an umbrella term used to capture a wide variety of terminologies depicting internet-enabled communications, platforms and tools, which has the potential to establish collaborative connectivity among billions of individuals over the globe) to bridge this divide. In the context of West Bengal, India, we describe our social entrepreneurial initiative named NexConnect which is a digital teaching–learning platform that connects learners from all socio-economic background and geographical locations with knowledgeable senior citizens. Unfortunately, in today’s world, the educated senior citizens in India, who possess knowledge from their acquired experiences, are no longer considered to be a part of the mainstream socio-economic activities of the nation. NexConnect uses the dormant knowledge resource of those educated elderly or retired teachers by connecting them online with marginalized children and young learners. The paper is a descriptive understanding of NexConnect as an example of Digital Socio-Technical Innovation of a social entrepreneurial initiative in solving the problem of access to quality education and to include marginalized communities into the mainstream. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Purpose: Outpatient care delivery is one of the key revenue sources of a hospital which plays a salient role in timely care delivery. The key purpose of the study is to propose a multi-objective simulation-based decision support model that considers the cost of care delivery and patient dissatisfaction as its two key conflicting objectives. Patient dissatisfaction considers service fairness. Patient idiosyncrasies such as no-show, unpunctuality and balking have been considered in the model involving multiple classes of patients. Design/methodology/approach: A model has been designed using data collected from field investigations. In the first stage, queuing theory based discrete event simulation model has been developed. Genetic algorithm has been used to solve the scalarized problem and obtain actionable insights. In the second stage, non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) has been involved to achieve the Pareto optimal fronts considering equal priority of the two objectives. Findings: The computational results considering various parameter settings can help in efficient resource planning while ensuring better care delivery. The model proposed in the study provides structural insights on the business strategy of healthcare service providers on optimizing the dual goals of care delivery cost and service fairness. Originality/value: The study is one of the early works that helps to improve the care delivery process by taking into consideration the environmental factors as well as service fairness. The study demonstrates the usage of simulation-based multi-objective optimization to provide a more sustainable patient centric care delivery. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The study investigates if the mean-downside risk optimization technique for asset allocation can shed new light on the equity home bias puzzle. We propose a combined EGARCH-EVT-C-vine copula approach to properly capture the stylized properties of asset return series and estimate the downside risk appropriately by CVaR. Using weekly stock price data from 12 countries including seven G7 countries and five BRICS countries, we estimate international portfolio allocations based on mean-CVaR optimization model and compare the results to the mean–variance allocations. The study has been done from the perspective of US investors. The results of the study suggest that the US equity home bias is overestimated by the mean–variance approach. The mean-CVaR model helps to factor in the additional risk that investors face in international portfolio diversification and provides a plausible empirical explanation for the equity home bias phenomenon. The findings of the study have direct implications for portfolio managers and investors for taking better international investment decisions based on the knowledge of optimum portfolio. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

Using a large sample of Indian family firms, we examine the investment behaviour of group-affiliated family firms versus standalone family firms during local state elections. While state elections negatively affect corporate investments, family firms invest more than non-family firms. Therefore, using a difference-in-difference estimation, we find that group-affiliated family firms invest significantly more than standalone family firms. Additionally, we find no evidence of distortive investments by group-affiliated family firms due to political pressure; rather, it appears that the unique structure allows these firms to make value-relevant investments when other firms adopt a conservative approach. Overall, our study improves the understanding of family firm investments during periods of political uncertainty. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Despite the growing prevalence of employee exemplification in the workplace, there is limited understanding of this assertive self-focused tactic. This study proposes to expand the exemplification research domain by exploring the emotional and behavioral conditions under which this impression management tactic is effective. Data analysis from 206 supervisor–employee dyads reveals that the indirect relationship between exemplification and individual performance through a supervisor’s liking is conditional on an employee’s emotional intelligence. Specifically, the exemplification effect on performance is sharply negative when a salesperson’s emotional intelligence is low, and it becomes insignificant when a salesperson is highly emotionally intelligent. This moderating effect is also strengthened by a supervisor’s age. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. © 2023, The Author(s).

Purpose: Businesses must now track the complicated supply chains of their products, which involve different manufacturers and suppliers. However, because supply chains are scattered across multiple countries and involve many institutions, it becomes an overwhelming practical challenge to ensure transparent recording and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. The myriad issues necessitate a technological solution that will improve supply chain transparency, assist in managing carbon assets and allow all parties to obtain credible information on carbon output. As a potential solution, this study offers a unique architecture that effectively combines “blockchain technology” with the carbon supply chain of a multi-institution business network. Design/methodology/approach: This research and proposed framework are based on publicly available reports on carbon emissions tracking, sustainability, carbon trade and emerging blockchain technologies. The authors also interviewed industry experts to obtain their input and feedback. Findings: Businesses must support the pledges made by their respective governments towards meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Although the emissions trading system encourages businesses to move in this direction, it can be challenging for them to efficiently manage their carbon assets owing to issues such as lack of standardised methods for tracking emissions across suppliers and manufacturers and the fragmentation of carbon markets. The carbon supply chain can maintain a record of the chronological flow of carbon emissions and eventually of all carbon assets by integrating a centralised ledger system based on blockchain technology. Originality/value: Global warming, climate change and carbon emissions are among humanity’s pressing problems today. To achieve net zero emissions by the middle of the 21st century, emissions must be drastically reduced. Global supply chains have a crucial role to play in this context. This article provides a blockchain-based technology framework for carbon emissions visibility and tracking. The authors believe such a platform will provide critical visibility and tracking support to globally dispersed supply chains, moving a step closer towards carbon emissions control and net zero operations. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Despite several women writers of South Asian origin writing on the postcolonial condition, management education, especially executive education, ignores the postcolonial. Even though a plethora of executive education programs target women managers in the contemporary diversity and inclusion era, these perpetuate a same-as-West and same-as-men paradigm. This chapter intervenes in this context by documenting the novel attempt by IIM Calcutta to introduce women managers to critical postcolonial thinking and women writers through a module on postcolonial woman in an executive education program for women managers. The participants resonated immensely with the program and requested for more accessible reading material articulating postcolonial women writers. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Vijayta Doshi; individual chapters, the contributors.

We study the role of formal institutions of contract enforcement in facilitating investments in small and medium firms(MSME). In a framework where established entrepreneurs can enforce contracts informally using their network ties and hierarchical advantage, we argue that an efficient formal judiciary helps entrepreneurs without any ties to informal business networks, disproportionately more. We test our theoretical prediction using a novel administrative panel-data from Indian courts and the nationally representative MSME survey data. Empirically, we treat entrepreneurs from disadvantaged castes (SC-ST) as those without traditional business-network ties. We find that improvement in court quality has a disproportionately larger impact on the investment decisions of SC-ST entrepreneurs. On average, if the time taken for a court to clear all existing cases reduces by 1 year, the initial gap in the probability of investing, between SC-ST and other entrepreneurs, gets reduced by 0.6-0.7 percentage points. © 2023

This paper explores the deep connections between experiences of health and changes in the local ecology, farming, and food consumption practices among tribal people in Odisha, a state in India. The role of governmental and market actors in initiating and reinforcing these changes is analysed in a political ecology framework using a relational understanding of ‘place’. It allows us to think of changing health outcomes and perceptions in communities as they simultaneously experience changes in access to forest resources and farming practices, and consequent dietary changes. Our paper suggests that with the creation of new social and power relations and ecological materialities, nutritional insecurities are produced or sustained, even as access to formal healthcare improves. We show how the plethora of development policies often work against each other and accentuate health vulnerabilities, even as they seek to create incomes and ensure food availability. © 2022 Global South Ltd.

Purpose: Entrepreneurship literature recognizes the founder’s involvement as a salient factor in determining the success of startups. Nevertheless, its role in conjunction with the marketing roles of founders has been relatively unexplored. Very little is known about how founder’s involvement in marketing tasks (i.e. developing products, sales and customers) helps attain success in early startups. To fill this knowledge gap, this study aims to qualitatively investigate the founder’s involvement under three vital functional areas (i.e. sales, customer development and product development) and also explain their entwined nature of the relationship as the early-stage startups grow to become a scalable businesses. Design/methodology/approach: This study used purposive sampling for conducting in-depth interviews with 11 startup founders in the midwestern city of the USA. A constant comparative method was used to code the interview transcripts, while juxtaposing them with extant literature. Findings: Using three levels of axial coding, this study identified 32 descriptive codes, 11 aggregate codes and 2 interpretive codes. Following this, the authors present five propositions that illustrate the relationship between founders’ involvement, customer development, product development and sales. Practical implications: This study offers guidelines to founders on how they could generate initial sales, identify early customers and build and sustain mutually beneficial relationships with them. Originality/value: This study contributes to the extant literature on entrepreneurship and innovation literature. It presents motivation and potential processes, including systematic activities performed by founders in generating sales in conjunction with customer development and product development, thereby making a novel contribution. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

In this paper, inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa, we draw upon our embodied experiences as non-white scholars from different parts of the South to examine our complicity and responsibility for inclusion in performing a Western, neoliberal, diversity-oriented, globalizing academia such as the United States' Academy of Management. We refer to the dominating practice of inclusion as universalist inclusion (uni-inclusion), where a hegemonic includer includes diverse subaltern others while blind to colonial differences. We argue that uni-inclusion has a dark shadow that perpetuates a “you are with us or against us” sentiment of white male superiority and violence, even as it elides the deep connectedness of epistemic, bodily, and material practices in the praxis of performing academia. Drawing upon our embodied and enacted experiences of tenures at Academy of Management as borderland scholars with relational reflexivity, we propose phronetic border thinking/doing praxis for trans-inclusion as a non-essentialist possibility of decolonizing inclusion. We share our understanding of how we have enacted border thinking/doing praxis so that it may provide pointers to pluriversalizing academia. Trans-inclusion is a neologism we suggest to indicate a liberating praxis for all in an era of decolonization and empire where diverse includers beyond self/other dehumanizing binarism engage within an ethics of caring and co-existence. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The over-the-top (OTT) industry has witnessed remarkable growth in recent years with a sharp increase in the number of subscribers, leading to increased competition among OTT platforms to acquire movie rights. Consequently, the gap between the theatrical and OTT releases has been diminishing over the last few years. An early release of a movie on an OTT platform fetches a higher distribution fee for a movie distributor (MD), however, it reduces the MD's revenue from the theatrical release. Therefore, it becomes critical for the MD to determine the optimal release time and distribution fee combination. In this paper, we analytically solve the MD's decision problem and provide a detailed analysis of how the optimal release time varies with changes in platform characteristics such as the proportion of ad revenue and the platform's risk profile, movie characteristics such as success factor and suitability for OTT, and market characteristics such as broadband penetration, piracy rate and customers’ preferences for viewing channels. We compare our results with the actual release times of 243 movies released during 2015–2022. We find that the optimal release time increases with ad revenue proportion, broadband penetration, and piracy rate, whereas the optimal fee reduces non-linearly with release time and depends on OTT's risk profile. Our findings also indicate that the optimal release time reduces for movies that do not provide any additional utility for theater goers, and as customers’ preference towards OTT increases. Our work provides much-needed guidelines for professionals dealing with movie releases on OTTs. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Purpose: This paper aims to provide an objective and comprehensive evaluation of the understanding of the professional code of ethics of Indian Professional Management Accountants in Business (PMAIBs). It further delves into their individual, job and organizational characteristics as determinants of their understanding of the code. Design/methodology/approach: This study relies on data from 247 responses to a survey-based questionnaire. Overall scores and sub-scores of the level of understanding of the code were calculated based on questions grounded in IESBA Code and ethical dilemmas. The drivers of these scores were then examined using one-way ANOVA, OLS, Probit and ordered probit regressions. Findings: This study found considerable heterogeneity in Indian PMAIBs' understanding of their professional code of ethics and substantial scope for improvements. PMAIBs were stronger in Application, Resolution and Threats but weaker in Theory and Principles. Further, PMAIBs who had ranked themselves higher on code-familiarity, had higher moral maturity, hailed from western India and worked for foreign-listed, foreign-owned firms were found to have a higher level of understanding of the code. Highly educated elderly professionals and professionals with more responsibility areas exhibited a lower level of understanding of the code. Research limitations/implications: Insights from the study can help professional bodies, employers and academics identify and segment PMAIBs based on their ethics-training needs and customize interventions, which can benefit businesses and society through reduced corporate ethical failures. Considering the risk implications of Indian PMAIBs' inadequacies in understanding their code of ethics, the Indian professional accounting organization (ICAI-CMA) should mandate ethics in continuing professional development and expedite its long pending convergence with the IESBA code, a global benchmark for professional accountants. Originality/value: This paper assesses the understanding of the professional code of ethics of PMAIBs, which is crucial yet amiss in the accounting ethics literature. While ethical decision-making is extensively researched, how well the professionals understand their code is yet unexplored. Research on PMAIBs, despite their unique ethical vulnerabilities and increasingly vital role in organizations, is still dormant. This study aims to fill these gaps by examining PMAIBs from India, an emerging economy under-represented in accounting ethics literature. India offers an important and rich setting for the study due to its large size, fast growth, deep integration with the global economy, high perceived corruption levels and poor ethical behavior of its firms. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Earnings management literature considers high disclosure complexity as indicative of obfuscation. We argue that this singular focus on disclosure complexity can be misleading as managers adopt other obfuscation strategies too to conceal earnings management. We examine several alternative obfuscation strategies using a sample of 67,649 management discussion and analysis (MD&A) disclosures of US firms from 1994 to 2020. We find that managers obfuscate not only by increasing the disclosure complexity but also by omitting negative information, reducing information content, and projecting confidence about the state of the business. Robustness tests suggest that our findings are robust to potential endogeneity concerns. © 2022

A large amount of administrative effort is directed towards making elections credible and reducing electoral fraud in large democracies. However, it is not clear if such policy efforts have a feedback effect on political competition. In this paper, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in perceptions of electoral credibility following the introduction of a technology-induced voting reform in India and find significant impacts on political competition. Electronic voting machines in India were mandated to include an additional layer of transparency by the introduction of a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). We find that with the introduction of VVPAT, the winning margins and vote share of winners decline whereas the number of candidates in the average race increases. The results are robust to econometric concerns arising out of staggered implementation of the program providing support to our identification design. Our results also point to heterogeneous effects of the VVPAT roll-out in constituencies that received it only once relative to those that got the VVPAT in two successive elections. Interestingly, we note that much of the welfare improvement through increased political competition is reversed with more experience, suggesting the presence of important learning effects. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Digital platforms have emerged as an important technology underpinning the new economy. A key problem in such platforms concerns provisioning decisions for customer-service requests, in order to maximize the provider's revenue subject to resource availability. Provisioning is important to meet customer needs, and in turn, for customer retention. The service provisioning problem, in addition to being NP-hard, is further compounded by the fact that the timeframe to make provisioning decisions is short, and more importantly, varies considerably across different platform domains. Digital-platform customers often request bundled services and are sensitive to when tasks get completed. We describe a behavioral-economic model of this problem and develop a domain-independent solution featuring a judicious combination of optimization-backed rule-based approach. Through extensive computational results, we show how our approach has the potential for generalizability and tailorability across different domains in a seamless manner, thus offering the advantages proposed in the software-reusability literature. Implications to platform sustainability, reusable platform solutions and to practical approaches to real-time platforms are also provided. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

We propose a mechanism based on regional inequality in economic activity to explain the heterogeneity in the spread of COVID-19 and test it using data from India. Contagion is expected to spread at a higher rate in regions characterized by greater movement of goods and services. We argue that mobility is higher in regions with greater degree of intra-regional inequality in economic activity. Such regions are usually characterized by a core-periphery economic structure in which the periphery is dependent on the core for the supply of jobs, goods, and services. Such dependence leads to a greater degree of mobility between the core and periphery, which in turn leads to higher rate of contagion. Using nightlight data to measure regional inequality, we find evidence in support of our hypothesis. Using mobility data, we provide direct evidence in support of our proposed channel; the positive relationship between regional inequality and COVID-19 infection is driven by mobility. Our findings suggest that policy responses to contain COVID-19 contagion need to be heterogeneous across India, where the priority areas can be chosen ex ante based on a regional inequality-based criterion. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

We examine how economic policy-induced uncertainty influences managers' discretionary accounting choices to achieve a smoother earnings stream. We find that managers offset the partial risk of policy uncertainty on reported earnings by using discretionary accruals. We mainly observe that firms report more negative discretionary accruals when managers are less certain about their prospects. We further show that managers' engagement in income-decreasing earnings management is more significant when firms’ current period pre-managed earnings are higher. To complete the story, we also find that the propensity of reversal of discretionary accruals is positively associated with levels of policy uncertainty. Our results imply that managers opportunistically use discretionary accruals around an uncertain exogenous environment to smooth earnings. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

Purpose: Subsistence marketplace can be characterized as a marketplace with widespread cognitive and social vulnerabilities, due to low income and low literacy levels. This may result in retailers exploiting the consumers. The purpose of this research paper is to develop a holistic learning program to impart marketplace intelligence to overcome these vulnerabilities of subsistence consumers. Design/methodology/approach: Using vicious cycle approach, the authors illustrate the self-perpetuating nature of consumer vulnerabilities. The authors argue that retailers behave in an opportunistic manner and exploit the consumers. This further reinforces the vulnerabilities of subsistence consumers resulting in a vicious cycle. The authors draw insights from Sen’s capability approach and propose marketplace intelligence as a potential solution to eradicate consumers’ vulnerabilities. The authors apply Biggs’s 3Ps model to design a learning program to impart two types of marketplace intelligence – marketplace metacognition and marketplace social intelligence. Findings: Based on a review of literature on subsistence marketplace initiatives, persuasive knowledge management and education research, the authors have devised a holistic learning program comprising an integrated learning environment (presage), problem-based approach (process) and assessment strategies for learning outcomes (product). Originality/value: This study marks a pioneering effort toward liberating subsistence consumers from the vicious cycle of retailers’ exploitation by empowering them with marketplace intelligence. This study’s novelty lies in conceptualizing consumer vulnerabilities in the subsistence marketplace as a self-perpetuating phenomenon and subsequently designing a holistic learning program to impart intelligence toward alleviating these vulnerabilities. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.