The paper reviews the fundamental indicators to provide a scientific production analysis of dividend decisions, focusing on corporate governance. The study is divided into three steps to conduct a structured review and a bibliometric analysis. First, the study employs the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses flow methodology and search strategy in the initial stage. Secondly, it uses the Scopus database search results to include the articles written in the English language only. Finally, the study includes performance analysis and employs VOSviewer software for science mapping. The findings indicate that themes addressed in prior research are the theories of dividend, corporate governance and dividend alliance, and the relationship between agency costs and dividend decisions. The findings further reveal that the articles on the relationship between internal corporate governance and dividend policy dominate the literature. In addition, the review shows that most studies examined the alliance of dividend policy with board size, board independence, and board gender diversity. The results give academicians and researchers insight into developing future research agendas. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.

We build a two-moment decision-theoretic framework to study how firms in the food-processing industry negotiate between risk and return while relying on imported inputs for production at an intensive margin. Two possibilities emerge: either a co-movement or a trade-off in risk and return under various industry and economic conditions. Building on our theoretical setting, we design a testable empirical framework that considers a panel of 316 firms in the Indian food-processing industry between 1993 and 2009. We find strong evidence of a decrease in the absolute risk aversion preference, although the magnitude varies measurably across firms. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Purpose: Legacy organizations, particularly government departments, have always remained focused on technology acquisition at a low cost. However, they must balance their quest for better financial performance with a commitment to social obligations and inclusiveness. This study aims to analyze the issues faced by a public sector department, India Post, in its digitization process. Design/methodology/approach: This study takes a case-based approach to analyze India Post’s digitization journey through the theoretical prism of the technology, organization and environment framework. Findings: The organization’s ability to benefit from innovative technology is constrained by its outdated structure and business processes. The other constraints include the limited technological know-how within the organization and the lack of intricate organizational process knowledge of today’s vendors. Practical implications: This study portends important implications for policymakers and provides a base for several inquiries for future research. This study attempted to identify the facilitators and inhibitors of digitization initiatives of a legacy government organization with extensive outreach in rural economy which policymakers can consider while rolling out digitization initiatives for public sector organizations. Originality/value: There are very few studies available as published literature which examined the digitization journey of a legacy government organization in a developing economy. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there was no published literature available on India Post’s digital transformation process. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought in many unique challenges and opportunities for patient care, and one is online healthcare practices. Patient satisfaction with online consultation is primary importance as online healthcare practices are evolving with time. Although previous research has examined how patient satisfaction with online doctor services can be further improved, there has been scant research on the satisfaction with online doctor services concerning Indian patients. Within the framework of service science theories, this study examines satisfaction and sentiments of Indian patients with online doctor services from multiple perspectives. A total of 38019 patient online feedback for 343 doctors was used for understanding patient sentiments. The sentiment analysis classified the reviews of the patients on online doctor consultation services. The finding suggests that healthcare service providers consider a systemic approach that includes core health services along with technical and marketing factors to proactively improve online patient satisfaction. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

After COVID, Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), suppliers, and distributors are seeking to streamline their local, and global supply chains, the issue has gained attention in how they identify, analyze and manage their procurement and supply chain processes with stakeholders. The use of supply chain adoption with green technology has been found to be preferred in international trade, which is forcing the Indian manufacturing, and services sector to realign their CSR (Corporate social responsibility) goals. Interviews have been conducted with a mix of manufacturing and service firms in India to map their sustainable procurement in green supply chain practices. The use of MAXQDA software for conducting thematic analysis to support the inductive theory and trend-building practices to know “what, why, and how” from interview responses. Each sector, manufacturing, and service showed distinct trends that divorce their approach to green SCM, and supply chain strategy for sustainable procurement though they have spread awareness about sustainable procurement with stakeholders, emphasizing economic benefits. Additionally, they pursued jointly to address environmental issues and extend societal benefits as a CSR effort. Variances in approaches in manufacturing are market-linked, time-based, and demand-driven while services firms showed green technology pledges as CSR initiatives along with an environmental emphasis in downstream SCM activities. © 2023 K.J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research.

Our study describes the conceptualization, development, and validation of a reliable scale to measure the Consumers’ Preferences for Ethical Entertainment Consumption (CPEEC) in the context of OTT platforms. Past literature has addressed Ethical Consumption in various contexts that hold significant importance among consumers. However, there is limited literature on the Ethical Consumption in the domain of OTT entertainment, which is a new and burgeoning field of literature. Conceptualizing and developing a measurement scale for CPEEC will help measure the ethicality of entertainment like films, web shows and reality shows. The CPEEC scale is developed and validated by performing 33 in-depth interviews, focus group discussions with 20 participants, and three online surveys with 707 respondents. Our findings highlight that the CPEEC construct is a formative second-order construct that consists of three first-order dimensions. Entertainment executives can use the CPEEC scale to strategize their existing and new content catalogs according to consumer values and beliefs. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Purpose: This study aims to develop a model for coordination and communication overhead in distributed software development through case study analysis in the Indian outsourcing software industry. The model is based on business knowledge, which can be classified as domain, regulatory, strategic, business process and operation process knowledge as per existing literature. Design/methodology/approach: Double case study method was used to verify an existing knowledge–management framework of software development from the literature. The stakeholders of both the cases were interviewed, and project documents were verified to reach conclusions. Findings: The findings supported the business knowledge classification from the literature. The concept can be used to analyze the software project in a distributed environment. Research limitations/implications: The research work findings are based only on two case studies. The study findings cannot be generalized and should be used as a learning tool. There can be large variations of project characteristics with differences in business knowledge requirements. The research shows the importance of business knowledge transfer in global software development. Practical implications: Projects managers in the distributed software development environment can use the findings in project planning and work allocation for better control over cost and schedule, etc. Originality/value: There is little research works attempted to study the business knowledge classification in the global software industry making the research novel. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

In the quest to address economic and environmental issues, the UNDP emphasized generating synergy among various sustainable development goals (SDGs). In this regard, SDG4 (Quality of education) is the most crucial SDG, as human capital may help improve the quality of life and environment in the long run. Against this backdrop, this study explores human capital's direct and moderating effect on carbon emissions in nine leading carbon emitter nations from 1990 to 2018. We rely on a quantile approach to calculate elasticity coefficients and verify results using the cross-sectional-autoregressive-distributed lag (CS-ARDL) procedure. The results suggest that human capital leads to carbon emissions across quantiles when the direct impact of human capital on carbon emissions is assessed. Similarly, human capital helps navigate carbon emissions when interacting with industrial value-added and per-capita income. The association between the squared term of human capital and carbon emissions is negative across quantiles in leading carbon emitter nations. Besides investing in human capital, these nations need to intensify the usage of cleaner energy and advanced technologies because the elasticity coefficients of these variables are found to be negative across quantiles. We propose a sustainable growth roadmap in which interconnectedness among certain SDGs is considered. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

This article investigates the impact of North-eastern Region Community Resource Management Project for Upland Areas (NERCORMP) and draws inferences on mechanism of change, context of an intervention and implementation design. Utilising data from three waves of surveys, we find that while there is evidence of significant changes in financial inclusion, productivity and social security, there are some issues in replication and sustenance aspects. Since the impact of intervention is observed across various domains such as socio-economic situation and natural resource management, thus, we believe that this paper presents an important case study in understanding the intervention efficacy, relevance and sustenance. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The proper disposal of large stockpiles of tire wastes has become a major challenge today. Through this study, an attempt was made to effectively utilize the large chunk of tire wastes as a reinforcement for improving the bearing capacity of shallow foundations subjected to purely inclined loads. The study was accomplished in two phases. In the first phase, the tests were conducted on reinforced beds by varying the quantity of tire chips, the thickness of the reinforced zone, the inclination of loading, and the equivalent relative density of the reinforced zone. The bearing capacity ratio (BCR) was used as a factor to quantify the gains. It was observed that the optimum quantity and thickness of the reinforced zone were 20% by weight and 1B, respectively, where B is the width of the footing. Improvements were found significant at both loose and dense equivalent relative densities. The BCR values under inclined loads were higher than in central vertical loading conditions indicating that the technique is more useful in the latter. The study also compares the environmental impacts generated from tire chip and geogrid foundations in terms of various midpoint and endpoint impact categories using cradle-to-gate LCA. Midpoint environmental impacts have been shown in climate change, freshwater ecotoxicity, fossil depletion, ozone depletion, and water depletion, and endpoint impacts are represented in terms of damage to ecosystem quality, damage to human health, and damage to resources. The study found that foundation prepared with waste tire chips is less polluting to the environment compared to geogrid foundation. In addition to this, landfill of waste tires will be reduced by this technology which will further help in the reduction of the total environmental impact of the system. Henceforth, by adopting the current technology into construction practices, the large stockpiles of discarded tires can be disposed of in a sustainable way. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Occupational incidents are a major concern in steel industries due to the complex nature of job activities. Forecasting incidents caused by various activities and determining the root cause might aid in implementing appropriate interventions. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the future trend and identify the pattern of contributing factors of incident occurrences. The study focuses on an integrated steel plant where different steel-making-related operations are carried out in separate units. The incident data of 45 months is used. Initially, a unit-wise trend of incidents (e.g., injury, near-miss and property damage) is forecasted using the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to determine the near-future incident trends and to identify the most incident-prone unit of the plant. The model is validated using six-month holdout data, and the predicted number of incidents is compared with the actual counts. The ARIMA model indicates that the safety performance of the iron making unit is found to be underperforming. In the second phase, meaningful association rules are extracted from text data using the apriori algorithm for the underperforming unit to discover the incident-causing factors. Results from text mining-based association mining suggest that bike and car-related incidents are the leading causes of injury. Similarly, gas leakage, slag spillage, and coke-oven door malfunctioning are causing near-miss incidents. The majority of property damage incidents are reported due to derailment, loading/ unloading and dashing of the dumper vehicle. Effective implementation of the study's specified rules can aid plant administration in formulating policies to improve safety performance by designing focused interventions. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

This article aims to examine the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on the financial performance of the construction and real estate industry, using the broad spectrum of financial ratios. The period of study is from 2011 to 2020, and paired t-test methodology has been used. It is hypothesized that there is a significant difference in the pre-M&A period and post-M&A period. The study findings conclude that profitability ratio and liquidity ratio have improved significantly, whereas leverage ratio exhibits no change in performance. In the efficiency ratio, the fixed-assets turnover ratio substantially improves, but the total asset turnover ratio and current asset turnover ratio show a slight improvement. The study concludes that the Indian construction and real estate company’s financial performance has improved overall for the acquiring firms during the post-M&A period. The study implies that the construction sector supports the synergy hypothesis, stating that M&A will improve synergy during the post-M&A period because of the consolidation of two firms’ resources. © 2021 Fortune Institute of International Business.

The work-from-home practices initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic have caused a paradigmatic shift in how we work. Work from home (WFH) led to an intermingling of the domestic and professional spaces, and the WFH phenomenon has asymmetrically impacted women’s work. In such a scenario, women professionals experience a greater work–life conflict, and the significance of family support comes to the fore. Studying this phenomenon in the Indian context is interesting because the primary responsibility for Indian women lies in the domestic arena. Female Indian professionals are expected to seamlessly fulfil their domestic duties no matter how demanding their job is. The multiplicity of challenges that affect women professionals’ productivity at work only gets compounded when women are expected to work from the domestic sphere where the demand of domestic duties constantly confronts them. Several global scholars have indicated that the burden of domestic duties was greater for women during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the burden of child-care, elderly care and cooking activities increased as outsourcing such activities was not an easily available option during the lockdowns which led to reduced work productivity amongst women. However, this study revealed that Indian female professionals reported better work productivity than female professionals working from their workspace. Indian women are used to fulfilling domestic and professional duties even prior to the pandemic, and Indians perceive greater satisfaction in interpersonal relational experiences rather than individualistic career goals. The study also revealed that family support did not increase when women were working from home, but the increase in family support increased women’s work productivity. Findings also indicate that female professionals with children showed significantly lower work productivity than female professionals (married and unmarried) without children. © The Author(s) 2023.

Purpose: This study addresses a central research question: Is individuals’ propensity to hide knowledge a “political phenomenon” among researchers in the Indian higher education institutions? Drawing upon social exchange and uncertainty management theories, the authors examine how a three-way interaction effect of perceptions of organizational politics, political will and political skill contributes to knowledge hiding. In addition, this study aims to develop a nuanced understanding of the knowledge hiding phenomenon in the Indian higher education context. Design/methodology/approach: This study adopts a mixed-method study design with an explanatory sequential approach. The authors gathered data through a cross-sectional survey of 286 researchers (Study 1) followed by two focus group discussions (Study 2) involving 13 academic researchers from five Indian universities. The sample includes full-time faculty members, postgraduate and full-time doctoral students engaged in research. Findings: The results of Study 1 indicate that researchers’ perceptions of organizational politics positively relate to their knowledge hiding. The findings of this study also suggest that the positive relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and knowledge hiding turns negative for individuals with high political will and high political skill. The focus group discussions (Study 2) explore significant predictors of knowledge hiding. This study unveils various characteristics of knowledge, knowledge hider, knowledge seeker and interpersonal dynamics as the key drivers of knowledge hiding in Indian academia. Originality/value: The significant contributions of this study are to provide new insights into the relationship between organizational politics and knowledge hiding and to unravel the various factors that incite knowledge hiding among researchers in the Indian higher education context. This study is one among the few in the knowledge hiding literature to adopt a mixed-method research design with an explanatory sequential approach. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: This exploratory study aims to explore the operational and financial constraints faced by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper highlights the role of supply chain finance (SCF) in the uncertain business environment caused by the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts an inductive approach and conducts convergent interviews with 32 SME owners and bank officials who are associated with SME-related financial transactions. The analysis of the interview data has been done through a grounded theory approach. Findings: The findings portray four key themes representing the operational and financial constraints faced by SMEs during the pandemic. Further, the study identifies four drivers of SCF adoption among SMEs, including capital constraints, high inventory turnover cycle time, high order fulfilment cycle time and long debtors’ collection period. Practical implications: The study provides various insights to the managers and owners of SMEs to deal with the economic crisis and eliminate the financial pressure created by the pandemic. The study enlightens the policymakers about the struggles of the SMEs during the economic turmoil created by the pandemic and guides them to introduce the relevant policies to resolve their problems. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify the factors driving the SMEs to adopt SCF due to the economic chaos created by the pandemic. Also, the study theoretically contributes to the literature by developing a theoretical framework for SCF adoption based on grounded theory. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The abandonment of announced merger and acquisition (M&A) deals during negotiations has recently gained prominence in academia and practice. However, the effect of macroeconomic variations on announced deal outcome is uncertain. This study attempts to determine the impact of interest rate, inflation, real exchange rate, and gross domestic product on the abandonment of domestic and cross-border M&As through autoregressive distributed lag regression on BRICS and G7 countries. Domestic M&As from BRICS are very volatile, whereas outbound M&As from G7 are mostly stable to changing home country macroeconomy. The findings reveal divergences in firms’ financial abilities and strategic mindsets in developed (G7) and emerging (BRICS) countries. Macroeconomic changes have a varying impact on deal abandonments. The results provide a better understanding of higher abandonments in emerging economies. This study will help firms create differentiated strategies for M&A negotiation under changing macroeconomic scenarios and policymakers frame policies influencing M&A outcomes. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

Consumer food preferences are undergoing a rapid transformation, and there has been a heightening of interest in eating healthy, sustainable foods. Food entrepreneurs are cashing in on the trend and are diversifying their existing offerings to include healthier options using alternate ingredients such as millets. However, these entrepreneurs face several challenges, and the actual growth of the market is lower than expected. The present study examines the opportunities and challenges faced by millet entrepreneurs. A total of 25 millet entrepreneurs were interviewed using a semi-structured qualitative design. Key opportunities include increased awareness of millets, people going back to their traditions, and informative food labels were the key opportunities, while a lack of awareness, lack of familiarity, preparation difficulty, sensory attributes, lack of affordability, inferior image, customer distrust, and millets’ longer gestational cycle were major challenges. © 2022 The Author(s)

The circular economy (CE) concept has gained significant attention to deal with the sustainability challenges in supply chain (SC). CE practices offers innovative approaches to optimize various SC processes leading to sustainable growth. However, adoption of CE practices faces many roadblocks where application of disruptive digital technologies can be a game changer. The extant literature lacks the investigation on drivers, enablers, critical barriers, and challenges in adopting disruptive digital technologies along with CE practices in SC. To fill this lacuna, an in-depth state-of-the-art of review of 187 articles has been conducted which resulted in the identification of 49 drivers and enablers, and 25 barriers and challenges. Furthermore, a framework has been proposed to elucidate the connection between disruptive digital technologies and CE performance in SC. Our review reveals that digital technology enabled CE practices helps to improve several performance metrics like resource optimization, waste reduction, product life cycle, occupational health, social performance, product safety and quality, and customer loyalty and satisfaction. The proposed framework will help industry practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in devising strategies for adopting disruptive digital technologies enabled CE practices in SC to achieve sustainability. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

The recent advances in manufacturing technologies give product design engineers the flexibility to model complex and intricate geometries, reducing the part count. It’s easier to assemble and less expensive when a product’s parts count is reduced, but creating a feasible assembly sequence for a revised product with different topologies requires careful consideration of many heuristics and attributes during the manufacturing process. This research proposed a novel assembly sequence planning (ASP) method for a given product, rapidly generating the feasible plan with minimum assembly levels. This method considers the possibility of assembling multiple parts at a single stage through various feasible directions, which promises reduced assembly time. The proposed method is tested on a fictitious product, and the solution is found to be more efficient than that obtained by current prominent methods. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Manufacturing industries are looking for efficient assembly planners that can swiftly develop a practically feasible assembly sequence while keeping costs and time to a minimum. Most assembly sequence planners rely on part relations in the virtual environment. Nowadays, tools and robotic grippers perform most of the assembly tasks. Ignoring the critical aspect renders solutions practically infeasible. Additionally, it is vital to test the feasibility of positioning and assembling components while employing robotic grippers and tools prior to their implementation. This paper presents a novel concept named by considering both part and tool geometry to propose tool integrated assembly interference matrices (TIAIMs) and a tool integrated axis-aligned bounding box (TIAABB) to generate practically feasible assembly sequence plans. Furthermore, the part-concatenation technique is used to determine the best assembly sequence plans for an actual mechanical component. The results show that the proposed approach effectively and efficiently deals with real-life industrial problems. Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.