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This paper seeks to explore the impact of corporate offshoring moves on the economic and psychological contracts between firms and their employees.

The paper draws upon literature from diverse social sciences to explore the phenomena of social contracts and offshoring. Especially deploying the exit‐voice theory of Alfred Hirschman, it is argued here that offshoring decreases the regenerative power promised both by exit and voice in helping organizations recover from decline.

Organizational systems and processes designed to deal with the “post‐offshoring worker” only serve to accentuate the sense of alienation felt by workers at the way they are regarded. This scenario poses a serious challenge to researchers and practitioners who need to make sense of these effects and deal with them accordingly.

This paper highlights, honors and legitimates everyday relations at the workplace on both sides of the offshoring divide, as sites of class struggle, of worker alienation, of intra‐organizational bargaining and, sometimes, of relations of imperialism and cultural dislocation. Understanding the complexity of this context and managing the actions arising out of this are important challenges facing the managers.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the phenomenon of knowledge transfer within multinational corporations (MNCs), and how the imperatives of thought and action that constitute new knowledge are received in the terrain that constitutes the MNC subsidiary.

This study employs an ethnographic approach, and juxtaposes primary data collection with a variety of secondary data sources.

The data are analyzed in light of the theoretical construct of hegemony, and three themes theorized that underlie the process of knowledge transfer. These include knowledge loss at the local level, the coercive practices that ensure knowledge transfer, and the invocation of imperial subjectivities by the headquarters of the MNC when dealing with subsidiaries from poorer nations.

This paper goes beyond the mainstream approaches into organizational knowledge transfer, by analyzing these issues in light of political economy, and the changing landscape of industrial accumulation. It offers in some measure, the building blocks of a different organizational theory, one that is sensitive to those subjects who are consigned to the periphery of mainstream organizing.

This paper seeks to analyze the manner in which an immigrant community (South Asian Shia Muslims) deploys religious institutions as a coping mechanism to survive in a demanding and culturally alien environment.

The analysis is derived from an ethnographic examination of a community of South Asian Shia Muslims in the United States.

The paper focuses on three elements of organizational coping. First, communities struggle with the promises and perils of transnationalism. Second, the coming of age of children, whose life experiences do not involve dislocation, produce interesting generational engagements. Finally, the community is often challenged by the nuanced task of political engagement with the broader society.

An in‐depth focus on employment‐related experiences of Shia Muslim diaspora in the West may be a fruitful area for future research.

Employers and governments ought to pay attention to internal heterogeneity of Muslims in understanding and managing diversity.

This is a seminar paper on Shia Muslim diaspora in the USA and relates the study to the realm of workplace diversity.

The purpose of this study, thermal radiation and viscous dissipation impacts on double diffusive convection on peristaltic transport of Williamson nanofluid due to induced magnetic field in a tapered channel is examined. The study of propulsion system is on the rise in aerospace research. In spacecraft technology, the propulsion system uses high-temperature heat transmission governed through thermal radiation process. This study will help in assessment of chyme movement in the gastrointestinal tract and also in regulating the intensity of magnetic field of the blood flow during surgery.

The brief mathematical modelling, along with induced magnetic field, of Williamson nanofluid is given. The governing equations are reduced to dimensionless form by using appropriate transformations. Numerical technique is manipulated to solve the highly nonlinear differential equations. The roll of different variables is graphically analyzed in terms of concentration, temperature, volume fraction of nanoparticles, axial-induced magnetic field, magnetic force function, stream functions, pressure rise and pressure gradient.

The key finding from the analysis above can be summed up as follows: the temperature profile decreases and concentration profile increases due to the rising impact of thermal radiation. Brownian motion parameter has a reducing influence on nanoparticle concentration due to massive transfer of nanoparticles from a hot zone to a cool region, which causes a decrease in concentration profile· The pressure rise enhances due to rising values of thermophoresis and thermal Grashof number in retrograde pumping, free pumping and copumping region.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, a study that integrates double-diffusion convection with thermal radiation, viscous dissipation and induced magnetic field on peristaltic flow of Williamson nanofluid with a channel that is asymmetric has not been carried out so far.

Operations management, purchasing and procurement management, inventory management and supply chain.

Introductory courses in Operations Management; MBA level and final year undergraduates in management. Masters level in purchasing/procurement management, inventory management and supply chain management.

The case deals with strategic purchase decision of a basic raw material used in ketchups. Ketchups represent 15 per cent of annual sales at National Foods. Mohammad Iqbal, Head of Supply Chain at National Foods, is confronted with the decision of buying tomato paste for fiscal year 2007-2008. He needs to decide how much paste to order from National Foods' supplier in China and when. He has the demand forecast for the paste for 2008 available to help him make the decision.

The case will introduce the students to issues in strategic buying of a basic raw material that is crucial to production. The case is not designed to teach just the basic concept of trade-off between inventory holding and stock out cost. The students should bring these basic concepts of operations with them to understand how these concepts are combined with knowledge of other disciplines to tackle a complex raw material planning issue. Students learn how to plan for the purchase of a perishable yet important raw material for an organization.

Teaching note.

This study aims to empirically develop a reliable and valid instrument measuring the online service quality in the context of the banking sector in India.

The methodological framework of this research comprises developing an instrument that is based on previous literature, qualitative and quantitative procedure. The study used the survey method and collected data via a well-structured questionnaire from a sample of active Internet banking users. The proposed instrument is identified by the data-reduction technique that is exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and validated through the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

The results confirmed that the digital banking service quality scale (DBSQual) contains 24 items in seven dimensions: (1) web architecture, (2) user friendliness, (3) efficiency of website, (4) reliability, (5) responsiveness, (6) security and (7) personalization. The relationship between digital banking service quality and e-customer satisfaction has also been found to be significant in this study.

The results of this study do not find general application for different banks operating in the same sector in India. More testing of DBSQual is required across various different contexts for validity augmentation. In addition, findings would be more reliable if the non-Indian context could be taken into consideration. Thus, such limitations open a window for future research.

This study is quite fruitful for the banking organizations in measuring their online services, and enables them to implement their marketing and operational strategies more effectively and efficiently.

The contribution of this study is the development and validation of a new instrument that is DBSQual that contains seven determinants of customers' e-service quality perception, emphasis on measuring online service quality in the Indian banking sector. These determinants will offer banks a promising starting idea for establishing an effective quality management for their online businesses. They will be able to increase the opportunities by tapping themselves at a competitive edge.

The promising factor for success in a prevailing knowledge-based economy is the excellence in customer service. Private universities are now becoming customer- and service-oriented organizations due to the competition. Therefore, many educational institutions treat their students as customers and restructure their educational practice based on the concept of market consumption. Therefore, many educational institutions treat their students as customers and restructure their educational practice. The purpose of this study is to determine the students' preferences as customers while studying at private universities and factors that affect their intentions to study at private universities when they adopt the student-as-customer concept.

The research model is analyzed with structural equation modeling. The analysis is done with the application of the measurement model and the structural model. The measurement model is first evaluated by examining scale reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity, whereas the assessment of the structural model is conducted for determining the predictive power and analyzing the hypothesized relationships between the proposed constructs through path analysis.

In the paper, seven path shows a significant and positive relationship. However, four relationships are positive but insignificant.

This study contributes to the literature theoretically as well as methodologically. Moreover, it is among the first research that is being conducted in Karachi. Secondly, this study developed a hybrid model by integrating one theory and a conceptual model to determine the factors affecting students' attitudes toward acceptance of the student-as-customer concept and their intentions. Therefore, this paper is useful in filling the gap in the higher education literature and also provides direction for universities to consider and prepare for the consequences of the concept's adoption associated with the number of students who intend to study at their universities.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that rather than contest the artificial schism produced by social scientists between “qualitative” and “quantitative” research, we should to accept this binary, however, contingently, and use it productively. This would be an act of “strategic essentialism” that would allow us to be productive in the research and inquiry.

The paper uses postcolonial theory to make a case for contingent representation, i.e. using artificial categories to carve out a space for heterodox theoretical approaches.

Researchers devoted to qualitative research must resist thinking, speaking and evaluating that research using quantitative thinking. Also, while ethical considerations are paramount in qualitative research, we need to debunk the narrow understanding of ethics as “following rules.” Also, qualitative researchers need to be aware of the institutional pulls that the research will be subject to, and also be ready to resist them.

This paper discusses how good research resists the siren call of institutionalization. It challenges the “common sense” assumptions of the field and brings them into the realm of the questionable. It seeks to theorize the untheorizable, and anthropologize the dominant.

The present work has proposed and employed an innovative hybrid method based on the combination of factor analysis and an artificial neural network (ANN) model to forecast customer satisfaction from the identified dimensions of service quality in India, a developing country.

The qualitative study is conducted with Internet banking users to understand e-banking clients' perceptions. The data is collected with the help of a questionnaire from randomly selected 208 customers in India. Firstly, factor analysis was performed to determine the influential factors of customer satisfaction, and four factors i.e. efficiency, reliability, security and privacy, and issue and problem handling were extracted accordingly. The neural network model is then applied to the factor scores to validate the key elements. Lastly, the comparative analysis of the actual ANN and the regression predicted result is done.

The success ability of the linear regression model is challenged when approximated to nonlinear problems such as customer satisfaction. It is concluded that the ANN model is a better fit than the linear regression model, and it can recognise the complex connections between the exogenous and endogenous variables. The results also show that reliability, security and privacy are the most influencing factors; however, problem handling and efficiency have the slightest effect on bank client satisfaction.

This research is conducted in India, and the sample is chosen from the urban area. The limitation of the purposeful sampling technique and the cross-sectional nature of the data may hamper the generalisation of the results.

The conclusions from the study will be helpful for policymakers, bankers and academicians. To our knowledge, few studies used ANN modelling to predict customer satisfaction in the service sector

Strategy scholars have argued that microlevel behavioral decisions by firms play a disproportionate role in making a firm nimble. Central to this issue is the interplay among several factors, such as actions by individual actors, firm-level decisions and broader changes in the economic environment that lead to a firm being successful in a competitive environment. The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical exploration of microfoundations research and subject the idea to empirical analysis using the constructs of customer orientation, competitor orientation and technology orientation as microfoundations of strategy.

Data collected through a key informant survey of executives were tested through a hierarchical regression analysis.

The results of the study suggest that the microfoundations of strategy are located more in a firm’s customer and competitor focus, rather than a technological orientation. The findings also suggest that that customer orientation is a significant component of firm-level strategy and needs to be incorporated into decision-making in firms.

This study provides a framework that integrates the structural determinants of firm performance with microfoundations theory to refine our understanding of market knowledge capability.