PurposeThis study integrates the conservation of resources theory and sustainable career theory to explore career sustainability for spouses of Indian bureaucrats. Two research questions are investigated: (1) What competing demands arise between spouses' career aspirations and their expected role as partners of bureaucrats? (2) What coping strategies do spouses use to navigate the competing demands arising from the severely constrained agency in their work lives?Design/methodology/approachGrounded in a qualitative inquiry, this study draws on semi-structured interviews with 26 spouses of Indian bureaucrats, applying thematic analysis to systematically map their career sustainability challenges and coping strategies.FindingsSpouses face competing demands, including the struggle for personal identity vs their partner's high-status role, career ambitions vs the constraints of bureaucratic life, and parenthood expectations vs the professional growth conundrum. Limited opportunities to build independent networks and persistent resource depletion further endanger their career sustainability. In response, spouses adopt active strategies to acquire resources and passive strategies to conserve them.Originality/valueThis study advances theoretical understanding by demonstrating how external factors, particularly a spouse's bureaucratic career, contribute to personal resource depletion, negatively affecting happiness, health and productivity indicators of career sustainability. Practically, our findings provide actionable insights for HRM professionals, employers (of both bureaucrats and their spouses) and policymakers in India.

Community Radio (CR) acts as a critical platform for fostering participation and cultural identity, especially in marginalized and rural contexts. The article proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing rural communication through an analysis of the activities of Radio Dhimsa, a community radio broadcaster in Eastern India. It critiques the tendency to treat 'rural' as a passive backdrop, advocating for a deeper understanding of the interplay between media, place, and rurality. By analyzing the cultural, administrative, and material dimensions of CR, the study highlights its multifaceted impact on content production and dissemination. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviews, and focus group discussions, and employing constructive interpretive grounded theory, the findings reveal Radio Dhimsa's critical role in cultural preservation, local empowerment, and amplifying marginalized voices. Broadcasting in the Desia (Indigenous) dialect, the station fosters belonging and counters socio-political marginalization while navigating the challenges posed by physical geography and climatic conditions. This research contributes to emerging scholarship on rural communication by engaging with both material and cultural dimensions of CR. It underscores the transformative potential of community radio as a tool for participatory communication and cultural preservation, advocating for media studies that reflect the complexities of rural identities and socio-cultural dynamics.

The unprecedented popularity of Generative Artificial Intelligence (henceforth GenAI) tools like ChatGPT and Gemini has the potential to disrupt the education sector in general. The initial reactions from educators have drawn a mixed response about the application of GenAI in management education, where some consider it a 'watershed' phenomenon, while others consider it an 'existential threat' to the teaching-learning system. Subscribing to the positive view, this paper argues that educators must promote the responsible use of AI-based tools, and imposing any artificial restraint on the application of GenAI technology can be deleterious to students' advancement. This is because GenAI will automate future jobs and create new jobs that do not exist today. As organizations are moving towards skill-based hiring, management education must prepare graduates with the requisite technical and human skills required for future jobs. However, previous studies have invested a lot of attention towards the technical aspect of the integration of GenAI tools by recommending capacity development programs to understand the nuances of new technology. However, they have overlooked the important aspect of adopting technology, i.e., attitudes and behavioral rigidities among educators. For this purpose, we argue that to overcome such a rigid mindset, institutions must focus on an unlearning mechanism comprising three phases: destabilizing triggers, discarding existing practices, and experimenting with new ones to help educators adopt GenAI tools in the education system. This study offers multiple theoretical and practical implications. It is a response to a call from researchers to apply existing theories to inform management scholarship about the implementation of GenAI technology and overcome educators' apprehensions that impede the ethical application of GenAI in management education.

The integration of deep learning techniques with financial technology (fintech) has revolutionized the credit risk analysis, a critical component of financial risk management. A pervasive challenge in credit risk assessment lies in the skewed distribution of data, hindering accurate predictions, particularly for minority class instances. In available literature, various solutions have been proposed to address class imbalance, albeit with limitations. Focal loss is one of the well-known loss functions proposed for handling class imbalance by running the hyperparameter gamma$$ \gamma $$. However, imbalance still remains in terms of number of hard-to-learn observations between the classes. In this paper, we have proposed integration of ADASYN with focal loss to mitigate class imbalance and enhance credit scoring accuracy. ADASYN systematically generates synthetic data based on hard-to-learn examples to counter skewed distributions, while focal loss prioritizes the training of challenging examples, fostering a more balanced model performance. This approach has been rigorously tested using real-world imbalanced datasets and credit assessment data, and the outcomes have been compared against a range of sample technique and loss function combinations. The results clearly show that our suggested strategy is better than other approaches. Although improving the accuracy of credit risk analysis is critical, model interpretability is just as important for enabling financial analysts to make wise choices. In order to solve this, we have measured the global and local contributions of each feature using SHAP (Shapley additive explanation). According to global interpretability, the top 4 parameters influencing credit risk assessment are checking account status, loan purpose, borrower age, credit history, and interest rate/installment rate. Moreover, local interpretability analysis reveals quantitative and direction differences in feature contributions. These revelations not only broaden our knowledge of credit assessment services but also highlight how important a role they could play in attracting new clients and generating income. This paper also highlights how the suggested approach may be scaled to other imbalanced real-world datasets, demonstrating how it can improve model performance in terms of AUC, G-mean, and F-measure.

Ensuring a consistent supply of vaccines from manufacture to distribution, storage, and administration relies on efficient management of the Vaccine Supply Chain (VSC). However, in recent years, vaccine shortages have emerged as a major issue for vaccine producers and child immunization programs, especially in low- and middleincome countries, which hampers VSC overall performance. This study aims to address the ongoing problem of vaccine shortages in India's child immunization program by identifying the main causes and investigating possible solutions to address the shortage issue. To do this, we propose an integrated framework that combines the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Complex Proportional Assessment with Grey Theory (COPRAS-G) methodologies. This framework yields 12 potential solutions for the 10 issues causing shortages. We show that demand uncertainty is the primary cause of vaccine shortages and that a better monitoring system is necessary to detect and treat shortages in a timely manner. To validate the stability of the results, we run a Monte Carlo simulation using a uniform probability distribution on the interval [0, 1]. The results of this study will provide valuable insights for policymakers on how to effectively manage the vaccine shortage issue and improve the performance of child immunization programs.

PurposeThe growing interest in blockchain technology (BCT) adoption and the pressing need to ensure resilience in construction supply chains (CSCs) have witnessed the attention of practitioners and researchers. Accordingly, this study proposes an integrated model for BCT adoption and resilience in CSCs.Design/methodology/approachBy highlighting the significance of the resilience dimension to combat disruptions in CSCs, this study employs an extended technological, organizational, environmental (TOE) (i.e. TOE with resilience dimension) framework to pinpoint factors that facilitate BCT adoption and resilience in CSCs. Subsequently, this study examines the relative importance of the identified factors by employing the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP). Further, sensitivity analysis is performed to examine the robustness of the proposed model.FindingsThis study identifies 21 factors that facilitate BCT adoption and resilience in CSCs, by reviewing the existing literature and collecting insights from researchers and practitioners. The outcomes of FAHP analysis reveal that construction practitioners should primarily focus on the technological and resilience dimensions to build BCT-enabled and resilient CSCs.Practical implicationsThe findings of this research should assist practitioners and scholars in understanding and managing the key factors of BCT-enabled and resilient CSCs for sustained growth in the competitive global market.Originality/valueThe novelty of this study lies in proposing and utilizing an extended TOE framework for BCT adoption and ensuring firms' resilience to combat disruptions, identifying factors that facilitate BCT adoption and resilience in CSCs and computing the relative importance of the identified factors.

The network of well-functioning commercial banks in a country ensures financial stability and accelerates economic growth. Due to increasing non-performing assets (NPAs) and bad loans, the profitability of commercial banks is declining continuously which results in lower revenue and interest income of banks, raising operational costs and loss of assets. The financial crisis resulted in loss of assets of banks, the decline in the value of business, customer dissatisfaction, and slow business growth. Therefore, it is necessary to control NPAs to improve the financial ability of the banking system. The study identifies determinants responsible for NPA problems in commercial banks. The research deploys multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques 'total interpretive structural modelling' (TISM) and 'cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification' (MICMAC) to develop a hierarchical model and to study the cross inter-relationship among these factors. The study finds two crucial paths which explain how NPAs problem can be controlled through improving 'credit efficiency' and 'operational efficiency'. The proposed novel hierarchical model would enable practicing managers, service providers, financial consultants to plan better to enhance the credit risk management efficiency of financial institutions.

In this paper, we present the substantial disparities in sectoral labour productivity across Indian states from 1983 to 2017. We decompose the change in aggregate labour productivity into two components - 'within sector' and 'reallocation' - utilizing a three sector disaggregation. Reallocation, or structural transformation, contributes modestly to productivity changes for all states except Punjab. Productivity growth in agriculture and manufacturing sectors is nearly identical, while growth in services consistently outpaces both. Regarding the contribution of different sectors to aggregate productivity growth, agriculture remains the primary contributor in four states, whereas growth within the tertiary sector dominates in other 10 states. Gujarat stands out as the only state where manufacturing contributes the most to its aggregate productivity growth, underscoring the stagnancy of manufacturing in the growth dynamics of the remaining states. The variance in productivity across states is most pronounced in agriculture, with no indication of these sectoral productivity variances diminishing over time. States that exhibited the highest level of agricultural productivity in 1983 (Punjab, Gujarat, Kerala, Haryana) witnessed the greatest decline in its agricultural labour share over the subsequent 35 years. However, the structural change component in their productivity change is not notably high. This signifies the prominent role of 'within sector' productivity change, accounting for approximately 81% of overall productivity growth of states.

Though the manifestation of wealth endowment in digital payments technology adoption ranges can have far-reaching socio-economic implications, it remains an understudied area. The unified payment interface (UPI), a dominant digital payment system in India, is examined in this study for the influence of wealth endowment on digital payments executed via UPI in India. Utilizing the Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression (IVQR) method alongside the smooth IVQR method on district-level data, this study addresses endogeneity and heterogeneous treatment effects. The results indicate that income inequality impacts digital payments with a pronounced effect in regions with higher UPI adoption rates.

The importance of bank liquidity in ensuring bank stability has been a long-standing discussion. This paper attempts to examine the role of excess liquidity in bank stability-liquidity creation links in India. The Two-Stage Least Square (2SLS) methodology has been employed to estimate the nexus, covering 40 banks from 2006 to 2024. The results suggest a positive role of excess liquidity in bank stability-liquidity creation nexus. However, the results are heterogeneous for bank groups, i.e., all banks, public and private sector banks, and for different types of excess liquidity and liquidity creation. The total and voluntary excess liquidity play a positive role in bank stability-on-balance-sheet liquidity creation nexus for all banks and private sector banks only. Moreover, bank stability (aided by excess liquidity) does not cause any impact on total liquidity creation for any bank groups. The findings suggest the need for bank stability (supported by excess liquidity) to augment liquidity creation.

Despite efforts by governments and marketers, the dynamics of consumer attitudes and their impact on behavioral intentions toward sustainable food consumption (SFC) remain largely underexplored. This study applies self-determination theory (SDT) and the theory of reasoned action (TRA) to examine consumer motivation in purchasing and adopting sustainable food. Additionally, the moderating role of environmental engagement on consumers' attitudes is explored. A two-way randomized controlled experiment is employed under nudge absence and nudge presence conditions. The results revealed that nudges significantly enhance the influence of SDT on motivation. Attitudes and subjective norms are significant predictors of consumers' purchase intentions. This research represents a pioneering effort to bring together nudge theory, SDT, TRA, and environmental engagement, providing a fresh viewpoint on consumer behavioral intentions within the SFC.

PurposeThe IT services industry faces ongoing disruptions due to rapid technological changes and corresponding shifts in customer expectations and competitor actions. Successfully addressing these disruptions entails IT firms to channelize their intellectual capital toward enhancing their ability to adapt. In this study, we propose a mediation model to examine the influence of a project team's intellectual capital on project performance.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from 215 project leaders across different business units within an Indian IT services organization with large operational teams. Mediation analysis was conducted to test the model.FindingsOur findings provide evidence for enhanced team performance through the indirect benefits of adaptive capability accruing from the teams' intellectual capital. Superior performance is achieved when the intellectual capital steers the adaptive capability of the firm.Practical implicationsProject leaders within IT organizations should constantly enhance their knowledge base and intellectual capital, enabling them to exploit the available knowledge to gain a competitive advantage. This intellectual capital created within the project team can be tapped to foster an adaptive capability, eventually leading to better performance.Originality/valueOur findings provide unique insights regarding the importance of investing in the intellectual capital of the teams, which results in the enhancement of adaptive capability and thereby the project performance. Data collected from a non-western setting also add to the existing body of knowledge on intellectual capital.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to empirically examine whether Indian firms use the breadth of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity as a substitute for their marketing activities under the mandatory norms.Design/methodology/approachTwo strategic marketing levers, namely, the firm's advertising and research and development (R&D) intensity, have been used as proxies for a firm's marketing activity. A sample of 389 Bombay Stock Exchange-listed firms from 2016 to 2021 have been examined through a fixed effects regression model to test the hypotheses. Propensity score matching and Heckman's two-stage approach have been used to overcome the problem of endogeneity.FindingsThe findings deduced from the empirical evidence demonstrate that both the advertising intensity and R&D intensity share a negative relationship with CSR breadth under the mandatory norms, though the relationship between R&D intensity and CSR breadth is not statistically significant. Overall, the findings are consistent with resource dependency and legitimacy theory and imply that firms can gain more exposure and can afford to reduce their advertising spending by focusing more on CSR spending across multiple activities under mandatory norms.Practical implicationsInstead of looking at the CSR spending mandate as a new form of tax, firms can take advantage of their CSR spending by involving themselves in more activities and look at their CSR spending as a strategic marketing activity.Social implicationsExpanding the scope of their CSR efforts enables firms to benefit a wider array of societal sectors through their spending, aligning with the foremost aim of the CSR mandate.Originality/valueThis is among the pioneering attempts to examine the CSR-marketing nexus under the mandatory CSR spending norms, concentrating on the focus of CSR activity rather than the amount that firms spend on CSR activity.

The second-hand market (SM) trades used products from the reverse channel. In practice, manufacturers such as Apple Inc. collect used products and sell refurbished products in the SM. However, third-party firms (TPFs) such as Gazelle independently manage the SM. Alternatively, the manufacturer may delegate the responsibility of managing the SM to a TPF under a contract or choose to operate in the SM with a TPF serving as a competitor. The optimal strategy to manage the SM is an important operations issue for the manufacturer as well as the TPF. This decision becomes even more critical when the manufacturer plans to sell the upgraded version, markdown version, and remanufactured version of the product concurrently. In the presence of product competition, SM selling can affect the prices and sales of the markdown product as well as the upgraded product. Therefore, in this study, we analyze impacts of the manufacturer's choice of delegation. Our analytical findings reveal that the SM selling strongly influences the equilibrium price and the demand for the markdown product offered by the manufacturer under all the mechanisms. However, demand cannibalization of the markdown product is most severe under the delegation mechanism. Additionally, we counter-intuitively reveal that the manufacturer is better-off under the delegation mechanism when the sales commission is low and remanufacturing cost is high. In fact, the delegation mechanism is found to be the most profitable arrangement for the manufacturer as well as the TPF. Interestingly, demand for the upgraded version product remains unaffected by SM sales under the independent TPF mechanism, allowing the manufacturer to launch the upgraded version product without any fear of demand cannibalization. Furthermore, we discover that consumers secure the maximum surplus under the competitive scenario owing to intense price competitiveness. For robustness checking, we further extend our model to consider the cases with variable remanufacturing cost, differential emission cost, environmental cost, and collection rate of used product.

Healthcare disparity is a major issue for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) faced by countries across the globe. It results in hardship for people living in rural areas who need healthcare services, ultimately impeding their right to health. A key digital transformation component, 'Telemedicine,' has the potential to reduce this healthcare disparity by offering virtual consultation, diagnosis, and treatment, thus leading to better healthcare access. However, research and practice on telemedicine adoption in rural healthcare systems (RHS) is nascent. The present study addresses this issue by examining the barriers to telemedicine adoption and mitigation strategies through a mixed-method study of India's RHS. In the first phase, the Grey Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (Grey-DEMATEL) method is used, which identifies seventeen barriers that impede telemedicine adoption in RHS and unearths the causal relationship between them. In the second phase, a qualitative approach is used, which helps propose barrier mitigation strategies under three heads: Patient Acceptance, Physician Buy-in, and Policy Support, referred to as the 3P framework. A total of 10 strategies are proposed under this 3P framework to strengthen the RHS. The study results provide valuable insights to policymakers and decisionmakers working towards healthcare digital transformation, UHC, and improving RHS.

The study aims to uncover the phenomenon of 'Digital Wellbeing' within an otherwise conceptually fragmented discourse. To do so, this study draws on in-depth interviews with 24 doctoral students across higher education institutions in India. Utilizing a constructivist grounded theory approach, the study reveals that doctoral students comprehend the phenomenon of 'Digital Wellbeing' by understanding it both denotatively and connotatively, appraising it either proactively or reactively, and adopting coping strategies that might be beneficial or detrimental. In this revelation, the study contributes by broadening the understanding, appraisal and the coping strategies used to achieve digital wellbeing. Shedding light on doctoral students' ever-evolving relationship with digital devices, this study draws implications at micro, meso, and macro levels and informs future research on the trisection of doctoral students, digital device use, and wellbeing.

This study investigates the impact of infographics and message credibility on perceived corporate hypocrisy and willingness to invest. Deploying a 2 x 2 between-subjects experimental design, the study shows that extensive use of infographics increases the perception of corporate hypocrisy whereas high message credibility decreases the perception of corporate hypocrisy. The findings show that investors view external assurance as a valid veneer of legitimacy and do not discount its importance. In fact, the results also show that infographics and message credibility do not impact investors' willingness to invest. The study highlights that impression management strategies do not impress investors.

Our study examines the impact of monetary policy on urban food inflation in India, which is crucial due to the significant role food prices play in the lives of millions in this developing country. Utilizing quantile regression, which is more appropriate for capturing tail dynamics of macroeconomic variables like food inflation, the study offers insights beyond the mean-based VAR approaches traditionally employed, which often yield inconsistent results. Our findings indicate that monetary policy does not have a statistically consistent significant impact across quantiles but only exhibits a weak random negative effect. This weak linkage may stem from the limited integration of urban food markets with the demand transmission mechanisms of monetary policy and the fact that food price instability primarily results from supply-side shocks within India's regulated policy framework. Our results challenge the findings of previous studies where consistence significant negative effect of monetary policy on food inflation were reported across quantiles in India. Our study benefits from an enhanced and robust methodological approach, offering a more reliable analysis of the interplay between monetary policy and food inflation in urban India.

Online Brand Communities (OBCs) are powerful platforms for fostering customer participation, retention, and engagement. However, existing research on online customer engagement (OCE) often underexplores the role of fundamental psychological needs. This study addresses that gap using a mixed-methods approach. Study 1 (qualitative, phenomenological) identifies three key drivers of OBC engagement-social needs, status needs, and the need for validation. Study 2 (quantitative) integrates Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Social Exchange Theory (SET) to develop and test a model linking these needs to personal and social integrative benefits via OCE, using data from 381 Indian users analysed through PLS-SEM. The results show that social needs and the need for validation significantly drive OCE, which in turn substantially influences both benefit types. OCE fully mediates the relationship between need for validation and personal-integrative benefits, and partially mediates the effect of social need on personal-integrative benefits and social-integrative benefits. Additionally, OCE partially mediates the relationship between need for validation and social-integrative benefits. The study contributes to the CE literature by offering a unified SDT-SET framework that captures both the motivational and relational dimensions of engagement and reconceptualises the need for validation as a key antecedent of OCE. Managerially, it highlights the need for brands to focus on fostering social connection and affirmation, rather than status-based incentives, to build more meaningful and enduring community relationships.

This study highlights the importance of ESG disclosures in reducing the adverse effects of political and climate change uncertainties on tourism firms' total and systematic risks. The study additionally examines the link between ESG disclosures and firms' risk and the association between uncertainties and firms' risk to demonstrate the viability of risk-reduction theory and stakeholder theory. The results indicate that the quantity of ESG disclosures plays a significant role in moderating the association between uncertainties and the risks faced by various segments of the tourism sector (Recreation & Entertainment, Transportation, and Hospitality & Restaurants). This shows that the active participation of tourism firms in sustainability activities can assist firms in this industry to better manage risk and mitigate the impact of uncertainties more effectively.