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Materialism has become a topic of increasing interest to researchers and policymakers because it can influence consumer behavior. However, a clear picture of how this phenomenon impacts consumers has proven to be elusive. Using an integrated framework, this paper aims to derive hypotheses from theoretical concepts of materialism and consumer decision-making styles and uses a survey of 1,216 respondents in India to test the hypotheses.

The present study is the first of its kind to test the impact of materialist values on consumer decision-making styles among a sample of 13-18 years old school children. The constructs are validated through a first- and second-order confirmatory factor analysis and an integrated second-order structural model is developed.

This study finds that materialism is a positive predictor of “recreation/ hedonistic”,; “confused by over-choice”; “brand consciousness”; “perfectionistic high-quality consciousness”; and “habitual brand loyal” style of consumers. Further, materialism has a negative impact on “price value consciousness” of consumers. These findings have important implications for theory and practice.

This study is restricted to school children in the National Capital Region and hence cannot be generalized to the whole young population in India.

Conceptualizing both materialism and consumer decision-making styles as second-order constructs, this is a maiden study that examines the impact of materialistic values on the consumer decision-making styles of young consumers.

The purpose of the paper is to identify how the intersection of power, context, subjectivity and directionality makes it possible for the targets of workplace bullying to deflate power imbalance between them and the perpetrators.

The paper is based on nine in-depth interviews with self-reported targets from different public sector organizations in India. The targets were purposively selected keeping in mind that they made deliberate attempts to counter bullying. Constructivist grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data.

Six themes emerged as sources of power imbalance and eight themes as the way of deflating power imbalance. The core category that emerged was “enhancing personal identity”, which was the underlying phenomenon leading to deflation of power imbalance, through the intersection of power, context, subjectivity and directionality.

The study indicates that power, context, subjectivity and directionality of bullying help the targets to identify effective strategies of deflating power imbalance. In the process, the targets indulge in personal identity enhancement. It further reinforces the understanding that power does not remain static and may shift from the perpetrator to the target of bullying.

The study provides various tactics that targets can use to counter workplace bullying. It implies that targets need not always leave the organization or succumb to the situation in order to deal with bullying. It encourages the targets of bullying and those who deal with bullying targets to indulge in personal identity enhancement through problem-focused strategies of tackling workplace bullying.

It also furthers our understanding of workplace bullying from the point of intersection of the four aspects of the phenomenon – power, context, subjectivity and directionality – which allows the targets of bullying to enhance their personal identity.

The past decade has seen a proliferation of research on service quality in education. However, little attempt has been made to understand the impact of student perceived service quality on sustainability practices of the university or the effect of such practices on student satisfaction. To bridge this gap, this paper aims to propose a conceptual framework to examine the relationships between service quality, sustainable practices and student satisfaction from the perspective of students.

A quantitative methodology was employed, and data were collected through an online structured questionnaire. Responses were gathered from undergraduate students (n = 419) studying in four colleges affiliated to a university in Delhi, India. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to validate the instruments. Structural equation modelling was used to examine the associations between the constructs.

The research revealed that student perceived service quality in education has a significant effect on their perception of sustainable practices of the university and student satisfaction. Further, sustainable practices predict student satisfaction.

The findings may guide the key decision-makers in the education industry to incorporate service quality and sustainable practices in their strategy and thereby enhance student satisfaction.

This research is the first of its kind to examine the impact of service quality as perceived by students on the perception of sustainability practices of the university. Further, it empirically tests the effect of perceived sustainability practices on student satisfaction.

The paper contributes to the long-standing interest in studying the relationship of social capital and trust. It examines the relationship between social capital and trust in a producer company and the role of perceived benefits as a mediating variable.

A multistage sampling was done to collect data from 395 farmer members from five producer companies spread over three states of India. Through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) latent constructs were mapped, and composite reliability and construct validity were established. PROCESS macro of Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) was used to probe relationship between social capital and member's trust and mediation effect of perceived benefit.

The authors’ research findings establish that the social capital has a positive and significant relationship with members' trust in a producer company and perceived benefit mediates this relationship.

The paper contributes to reduce complexity of social capital theory by differentiating sources and benefits of social capital. It opens up the avenues of testing theoretically valid mediation effects of many other constructs.

The role of member's perceived benefits as a mediator between social capital and members' trust is a new knowledge to the literature of social capital.

Since the hospitality industry is driven by people, effective utilization of knowledge among various organizational units is required to ensure guest satisfaction and in turn superior performance. Research trying to find the implications of transactive memory systems (TMSs), an integrative mechanism for knowledge management in organizations, has yielded ambiguous and mixed results, leading the researchers to believe that the linkages may not be as straightforward as previously imagined. In this study, the authors theoretically build their arguments based on the knowledge-based view of the firm and empirically test these linkages using data collected from the small hotels of India.

Data were collected from the owner-managers or senior executives of small hotels operating in the Uttarakhand state of India, and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) and Hayes process macro.

It was found that for the hospitality firms, the TMS is an enabler for performance only when the focus of knowledge creation and utilization is on building effective strategic orientations. Further, the technology orientation (TO) and learning orientation (LO) of the hotel mediate the relationship between the TMS and firm performance.

Effective knowledge sharing among employees helps availability of credible and crucial information about customers, which eventually helps in long-term mutually beneficial relationships with the customers, leading to greater economic value creation for the hotel.

By establishing theoretical links between knowledge creation and utilization, and validating these linkages using data collected from the hotel industry in India, this study offers unique and useful insights for the theoretical advancement of the hospitality literature. This study also makes a case that small hotels investing their energy and resources into the creation of a transactive memory systems could reap benefits through appropriate strategic postures.

A multispecialty hospital possesses sustainable competitive advantage if it continuously improves performance, repeatedly delivers quality service and unique value to the patients and the sources of competitive advantage are valuable, rare, inimitable, non-substitutable or causally ambiguous. The term sustainable competitive advantage is vague and ambiguous and the environment in which hospitals operate is dynamic, turbulent and disruptive. Therefore, sources of competitive advantage must change and evolve with time. This paper aims to explore the themes of competitive advantage in a dynamic environment for multispecialty hospitals in India by studying data from secondary sources for five hospitals.

The findings of the case study were based on the analysis of secondary data that are extracted from the official websites of the hospitals, with the grounded theory approach.

Five identified themes are as follows: changing and adapting; clinical excellence; creating unique value; managing unpredictable circumstances and patient-centric approach. All the themes supported hospital performance, service and value delivered to patients and therefore may help in building a competitive advantage of the hospital. However, sustainability factors were inconsistent across the themes.

The CXOs and CMOs of hospitals can review the themes periodically and re-align the business strategies to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

The findings of the study uncovered the criticality of re-alignment of resources deployed in the unpredictable and ever-changing environment in which hospitals thrive to build sustainable competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to present the application of the neural-based estimation method, Neural-Gauss-Newton (NGN), using the real flight data of a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

The UAVs in general are lighter in weight and their flight is usually influenced by the atmospheric winds because of their relatively lower cruise speeds. During the presence of the atmospheric winds, the aerodynamic forces and moments get modified significantly and the accurate mathematical modelling of the same is highly challenging. This modelling inaccuracy during parameter estimation is routinely treated as the process noise. Furthermore, because of the limited dimensions of the small UAVs, the measurements are usually influenced by the disturbances caused by other subsystems. To handle these measurement and process noises, the estimation methods based on neural networks have been found reliable in the manned aircrafts.

Six sets of compatible longitudinal flight data of the designed UAV have been chosen to estimate the parameters using the NGN method. The consistency in the estimates is verified from the obtained mean and the standard deviation and the same has been validated by the proof-of-match exercise. It is evident from the results that the NGN method was able to perform on a par with the conventional maximum likelihood method.

This is a partial outcome of the research carried out in estimating parameters from the UAVs.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the longitudinal aerodynamic characterization of an unmanned cropped delta configuration from real flight data. In order to perform this task an unmanned configuration with cropped delta planform and rectangular cross-section has been designed, fabricated, instrumented and flight tested at flight laboratory in Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), India.

As a part of flight test program a real flight database, through various maneuvers, have been generated for the designed unmanned configuration. A dedicated flight data acquisition system, capable of onboard logging and telemetry to ground station, has been used to record the flight data during these flight test experiments. In order to identify the systematic errors in the measurements, the generated flight data has been processed through data compatibility check.

It is observed from the flight path reconstruction that the obtained biases are negligible and the scale factors are almost close to unity. The linear aerodynamic model along with maximum likelihood and least-square methods have been used to perform the parameter estimation from the obtained compatible flight data. The lower values of Cramer-Rao bounds obtained for various parameters has shown significant confidence in the estimated parameters using maximum likelihood method. In order to validate the aerodynamic model used and to increase the confidence in the estimated parameters a proof-of-match exercise has been carried out.

The entire work presented is original and all the experiments have been carried out in Flight laboratory of IITK.

This study aims to explore the mechanism by which intellectual capital and corporate social responsibility (CSR) influence the sustainable competitive performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with the mediating role of organizational innovation in an emerging economy.

The data collection was conducted through a survey completed by 208 owners and top managers operating in the service, trading and manufacturing sector SMEs, positioned within twin cities of Pakistan. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was utilized for data analysis.

The results of the study suggest that intellectual capital and CSR have a markedly positive influence on the sustainable competitive performance of SMEs. The organizational innovation appears to mediate these relationships.

This study pioneers research on the links between intellectual capital, CSR organizational innovation and sustainable competitive performance of SMEs. The current research contributes to the literature by defining intellectual capital and CSR as an antecedent and organizational innovation as an intervening variable for the sustainable competitive performance of SMEs. In addition, this study underlines the significance of intellectual capital and CSR activities as valuable intangible assets for the achievement of sustainable competitive performance of SMEs.

Managing brands during crisis (in the context of terrorism) does not have much historical research and the studies that exist focus on communication. Terrorism is more frequent; not easily prevented; and rarely a top management priority for risk management. The purpose of this paper is to use exiting theory on brand components and architecture to prevent brand burn. Brand burn is defined as the accidental negative impact formed on a brand due to a crisis outside the control of an organization, which may not be perceived as directly related to the organization's product or management.

Crises are characterized by an overload of information. The exploratory study uses a case study methodology to get insights on how to manage a brand through a crisis. To validate findings, triangulation using independent reviewers, theory and secondary reports is used.

First, a conceptual framework to manage brand burn is presented. Second, from the practitioner's point of view, the paper provides a checklist that gives strategic tips for preparing for and managing brand crisis. The findings show that both brand components and brand architecture can be used to manage brands through crisis.

The findings contribute to theory by adding to the evolving literature on brand architecture, brand components and crisis management. Key challenges were organizing and prioritizing the vast amount of data from secondary sources, including social media sites; time was an issue as memories fade; and another limitation was getting official confirmation since perceptions play a key role.

This is the first study looking at a terrorist crisis from a brand management point of view. This paper contributes to theory by adding to the research in brand architecture and brand components and crisis management. Future studies can look at the model robustness in other crisis situations and the impact of managing social media.