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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 increased use of Information Systems (IS) as a working tool for employees increases the number of accounts and passwords required. Despite being more aware of password entropy, users still often participate in deviant password behaviors, known as “password workarounds” or “shadow security.” These deviant password behaviors can put individuals and organizations at risk, resulting in a data breach. This paper aims to engage IS users and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), focused on designing, developing and empirically validating the Password Workaround Cybersecurity Risk Taxonomy (PaWoCyRiT) – a 2x2 taxonomy constructed by aggregated scores of perceived cybersecurity risks from Password Workarounds (PWWAs) techniques and their usage frequency.

This research study was a developmental design conducted in three phases using qualitative and quantitative methods: (1) A set of 10 PWWAs that were identified from the literature were validated by SMEs along with their perspectives on the PWWAs usage and risk for data breach; (2) A pilot study was conducted to ensure reliability and validity and identify if any measurement issues would have hindered the results and (3) The main study data collection was conducted with a large group of IS users, where also they reported on coworkers' engagement frequencies related to the PWWAs.

The results indicate that statistically significant differences were found between SMEs and IS users in their aggregated perceptions of risks of the PWWAs in causing a data breach, with IS users perceiving higher risks. Engagement patterns varied between the two groups, as well as factors like years of IS experience, gender and job level had statistically significant differences among groups.

The PaWoCyRiT taxonomy that the we have developed and empirically validated is a handy tool for organizational cyber risk officers. The taxonomy provides organizations with a quantifiable means to assess and ultimately mitigate cybersecurity risks.

Passwords have been used for a long time to grant controlled access to classified spaces, electronics, networks and more. However, the dramatic increase in user accounts over the past few decades has exposed the realization that technological measures alone cannot ensure a high level of IS security; this leaves the end-users holding a critical role in protecting their organization and personal information. Thus, the taxonomy that the authors have developed and empirically validated provides broader implications for society, as it assists organizations in all industries with the ability to mitigate the risks of data breaches that can result from PWWAs.

The taxonomy the we have developed and validated, the PaWoCyRiT, provides organizations with insights into password-related risks and behaviors that may lead to data breaches.

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.

This secondary source case is based mainly on legislative documents (that tracked the initiation and progress of the Parental Rights in Education bill that later became an Act), corporate documents (published by The Walt Disney Company) and news articles from publications such as The New York Times and Bloomberg. All sources are cited in the case narrative and as end notes.

In April 2022, The Walt Disney Company and its CEO, Robert Chapek, were at the center of a controversy over the company’s opposition to the State of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill. The bill, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics, prohibited instruction on sexual identity and gender orientation in the state’s elementary schools. The controversy stemmed from Disney’s initial non-reaction to the bill and its later strident opposition and call for its repeal. Chapek was pressured by negative media publicity and employee disgruntlement on the one hand and adverse economic consequences for opposing the bill by the state’s Governor, Ron DeSantis. Chapek and the Board had to respond to the political threats to Disney’s economic well-being while appeasing its employees and other stakeholders who wanted the company to be a corporate champion in diversity, equity and inclusion.

The case is best suited for advanced undergraduate or graduate leadership, strategic management and marketing courses. From a leadership and strategic management perspective, the case is well-suited for demonstrating the evolving expectations of leaders and corporate social responsibility, as well as the concepts of issue framing and nonmarket management. Instructors may also leverage the case in marketing courses (e.g. brand management), as CEO activism (i.e. messaging and practice) is one characteristic of brand activism (Animation Guild, 2022).

Call it the curse, the myth, the legend, the dacoits, the flora and fauna, the River, and the valley remains untouched and pristine and is home to many endemic species and is blessed with stark but beautiful landscape, the surreal world of an era gone by, the ravage of the ravines, which have been preserved, protected, and conserved, albeit for the ‘ancient curses,’ and yes being a home to the ‘dreaded outlaws’ and ‘modern dacoits.’ Whether it was the fear for one’s life considering it was a dacoit area or also known as ‘gun powder area,’ or the curses that none wanted to garner to themselves, Chambal is slowly but steadily ebbing out of the dark shadows that it once was. The river itself passes through Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh, before joining the river Yamuna. Declared a Protected Area (PA) in 1978, the nomenclature of dark tourism will be ubiquitous to the Chambal River valley, considering that the area is dotted by a multitude of forts, and heritage destinations, that have frozen in the sands of time; either on account of the stories that meander, as the river does, with its deep ravines, ravines that invite the adventurer. It is the last bastion for the nation’s endangered wildlife, viz., Gharial, Maggar, Turtles, Otter, and the fresh water Dolphin, which has encouraged the Government to get the local community to be part of the special purpose vehicle promoting tourism. The authors known for their contribution to community-based ecotourism (CBE) have visited the Chambal area and worked with the communities and bureaucracy to ensure conclusions.