Search results

Several countries in South Asia face the challenge of ineffective educational reforms manifest in increasing rates of school failure and poor learning outcomes after embarking along education for all. Critical voices from the South have questioned the relevance and appropriateness of ideas that have shaped these reforms. Narratives from the region tell us that importation of educational concepts and policy orientations have led to the dismantling of existing structures and processes of education, creating new forms of inequities and disadvantage. The sheer scale and diversity of populations within the region poses formidable challenges and opportunities for contextual innovation. The construction of national imaginaries in the diverse societies of South Asia has the potential to provide new discourses to educational reform; going beyond the abstract goals set by disconnected international experts and the institutional processes they represent. This chapter deliberates on the need to establish a persuasive critical perspective that can influence and shape the trajectories of policy and practice, research and theorization, within the field of comparative education in South Asia, and the global south.

The purpose of this paper is to determine those factors perceived by users to influence the successful on‐going use of e‐commerce systems in business‐to‐business (B2B) buying and selling transactions through examination of the views of individuals acting in both purchasing and selling roles within the UK National Health Service (NHS) pharmaceutical supply chain.

Literature from the fields of operations and supply chain management (SCM) and information systems (IS) is used to determine candidate factors that might influence the success of the use of e‐commerce. A questionnaire based on these is used for primary data collection in the UK NHS pharmaceutical supply chain. Factor analysis is used to analyse the data.

The paper yields five composite factors that are perceived by users to influence successful e‐commerce use. “System quality,” “information quality,” “management and use,” “world wide web – assurance and empathy,” and “trust” are proposed as potential critical success factors. Of these, all respondents ranked information quality, system quality, and trust as being of most importance, but differences in the rankings between purchasing and selling respondents are evident.

The empirical study is limited to a single supply network, and although the findings seem intuitively to be of relevance to other sectors and supply contexts, there remains an opportunity to test this through further research. There is also an opportunity to extend the survey research, particularly into the wholesaler organisations that operate in the sector of study.

The managerial implications that result from this research provide practical guidance to organisations in this sector on how to ensure that e‐commerce systems for B2B buying and selling are used successfully.

This paper furthers knowledge and understanding in the fields of operations management, IS, and SCM, by suggesting potential determinants of successful e‐commerce use in both buying and selling organisations within supply networks.

To determine how the correlational structure of emotion differs for individuals age 60 and above, compared to those under age 60, and to discuss the profound implications these differences may have for the experience and management of emotion.

Structural equation modeling and shortest path analysis of emotion items from the General Social Survey (GSS)’s (1996) emotions module.

Some positive and negative emotion pairs are more distant for individuals over age 60, while others are in fact closer. This variability leads to differences in available shortest paths between emotions, especially when emotional transitions require segueing through intermediary feelings. The segueing emotions most readily available to those over 60 are limited to the poles of affective meaning, whereas those used by ones under age 60 are more variable. The majority of negative emotions are more tightly correlated, whereas the majority of positive emotions are less so, among those over age 60.

Although the measures are limited to 18 of the 19 emotions recorded by the GSS, and are based on self-report data regarding feelings felt over a period of seven days, these results suggest that attempts at intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion management may differ depending up the age of the actor/object.

Addresses the need for more nuanced analyses of emotional experience that goes moves beyond simple frequencies. Also suggests potential bridges between sociological and psychological approaches to the study of emotion.

The exogenous factors influencing state enterprise managerial decision making in the People's Republic of China are identified. These environmental forces are categorized as governmental and sociocultural in nature. Governmental influences are the centralized management of the economy, the dual command structure found in the Chinese state enterprises, state enterprise financing, product quality, and state enterprise production quotas. Sociocultural influences are morality, deference to authority, risk avoidance, long term view, community versus individual orientation and the legal system.

In this chapter, the authors present a conceptual perspective on resilience that is grounded in self-regulation theory, to help address theoretical, empirical, and practical concerns in this domain. Despite the growing popularity of resilience research (see Linnenluecke, 2017), scholars have noted ongoing concerns about conceptual confusion and resulting, paradoxical, stigmatization associated with the label “resilience” (e.g., Adler, 2013; Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). The authors seek to advance this domain via presenting a clarified, theoretically grounded conceptualization that can facilitate unified theoretical advancements, aligned operationalization, research model development, and intervention improvements. Resilience is defined here as continued, self-regulated goal striving (e.g., behavioral and/or psychological) despite adversity (i.e., after goal frustration). This self-regulatory conceptualization of resilience offers theoretically based definitions for the necessary conditions (i.e., adversity and overcoming) and outlines specific characteristics (i.e., unit-centered and dynamic) of resilience, distinguishes resilience from other persistence-related concepts (e.g., grit and hardiness), and provides a framework for understanding the connections (and distinctions) between resilience, performance, and well-being. After presenting this self-regulatory resilience perspective, the authors outline additional paths forward for the domain.

Scholars have suggested that the current dynamics within the provision of public services have shaped traditional administration into governance by contract. Under such conditions, restructuring public procurement, specifically within the technological capabilities available within e-procurement, has often been associated with manifold positive financial and policy outcomes. The supposed benefits of digitalizing public procurement are legion, yet they are often assumed and rarely grounded in hard evidence. Based on the results of a survey of procurement specialists (n=499), this article suggests that in its current form e-procurement adoption is failing to uphold the transformative benefits that it is regularly attributed within popular discourse. An extensive literature review is undertaken in order to construct practical understandings of the factors that could explain the rather disappointing early developments. The paper offers a practice oriented normative model that would increase the probability of achieving transformative dynamics as a result of e-procurement adoption.

Chinese and U.S. human resource management systems differ on a number of cultural dimensions. The most important of these are described with respect to fundamental organization and work‐related assumptions about people and performance, rewards, training and development, and educational background of human resource practitioners. An appreciation of and respect for these differences is a prime requirement for effecting a successful Sino‐American venture. This is especially important given that China is the world's largest market, and because U.S. companies are recently finding that joint ventures with China are paying off. This paper helps business people and academics understand the world's fastest growing economy and the growing influence of Confucian Dynamism that affects HRM practice in Chinese ventures. The individualism‐collectivism dimension and the psychological contract also helps managers understand cultural differences and apply appropriate management techniques.

Gender-stereotyped organizational expectations compromise outcomes desired from numerically balanced gender representation. Sex-roles allow both men and women to exhibit masculine or feminine behaviors based on their self-construal of “psychological-gender.” Emotional intelligence (EI) is considered “feminine” and rational intelligence “masculine.” So, using Bem sex-role inventory and Emotional Intelligence Appraisal, the current study explored EI in 217 senior Indian managers from masculine/feminine sex-role perspective. There was no difference in EI of men/women. Moreover, EI did not differ in men/women categorized in “same” sex-role. However significant differences emerged across sex-roles with feminine sex-role participants actually scoring significantly lesser than androgynous or masculine sex-role participants although emotional intelligence is considered as a feminine intelligence. Implications of sex-role-driven differences in EI in organizational context are discussed.

Economies and societies are not digitally isolated. Digital technologies are widely recognised as key drivers of information dissemination, knowledge sharing, income and employment. Digital technologies also influence the interlinkages of digitalisation, gender and labour market outcomes. Digital technologies impact every sphere of day-to-day life. It impacts ways of communication, trade and business; influences networking abilities; shapes societal norms, attitudes and behaviours. It is hence argued that digital technologies may have crucial implications for women's participation in the workforce.

Gender equality and increasing women's workforce participation is an important goal under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Research indicates that women are mainly involved in agricultural work, blue-collar formal work, while collar formal work, and entrepreneurship. Digital technologies significantly impact the ways of working in all these sectors. Consequently, it is argued that digital technologies influence women's participation across all such types of work.

This chapter aims at unravelling the linkages between digital technologies and women's workforce participation. To this end, the influences of digital technologies on women's participation in agricultural work, blue-collar formal work, white-collar formal work and entrepreneurship are discussed. The implications and impacts of the use of broadband, internet and mobile technologies are also discussed. This chapter also includes important theories of women's workforce participation and discusses them in light of digitalisation.

This paper discusses how IT impacts the job and individual characteristics of: autonomy, workload, organizational commitment, and perceived accomplishment‐achievement in two different cultures. Contrary to expectations, the results showed that there are no significant differences. When the samples were broken down into sub‐groups of system level and user type, there were significant differences on task identity levels. Further analysis showed that when system capabilities are matched with the appropriate user type and job functions, task identity levels are higher than with any other combination. Implications of the results for developing more interactional models in evaluating IT investments and facilitating effective learning environments are discussed.