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The purpose of this study is to identify the needs and concerns of older people in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India during the lockdown phase of the Covid-19 crisis. The study also aims to present a viable model for extending needed support through a telephone helpline run by a team of young student volunteers.

The study uses a thematic analysis of the interaction between callers (service users) and volunteers.

The study shows that the main reasons that motivate the use of the helpline are to seek medical advice and to request medical services and medical supplies free of charge. However, the study also shows that other reasons for calling the helpline are feelings of loneliness and the need for psychological support, especially due to insufficient assistance from families.

The study shows the benefits of providing this type of service for older people during a time of national health crisis. The service is cost-effective and offers a one-stop assistance point.

The service also constitutes an avenue for building intergenerational solidarity and empathy between younger and older people. This is especially important for citizens who feel socially isolated and disconnected from the rest of society.

The study offers a model for an easily created resource that could usefully be exported to other geographic settings.

Unlike multinational companies, small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) have budget constraints and, thereby, cannot invest heavily in improving the creativity of employees. They look for alternative budget-friendly ways to do the same. The authors of the current paper attempt to identify two psychological-based constructs which positively influence creativity among employees. Both these psychological constructs may be improved among the employees using suitable interventions from the human resource (HR) professionals and line managers working in the organization. This study is an attempt to test the influence of organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) and psychological capital (PC) (both malleable) on creative performance behaviour (CPB) among SME employees.

Validated instruments were used to collect data. Structural equation model (SEM) was used to evaluate the 377 responses collected from the employees working in three SME's in India. All three SMEs work in the area of innovative process design and require a high level of creativity among employees.

PC fully mediates the relationship between OBSE and the CPBs of employees. Employees experiencing higher levels of OBSE will develop higher self-esteem, and these employees will exhibit more creative behaviours, increasing the likelihood of achieving creative results.

This study provides valuable inputs to the creativity literature as it describes the process of how self-esteem influences the creativity of an employee. HR professionals working in SMEs can work on enhancing the OBSE and PC (both malleable) of employees to improve creativity among employees.

To the best of the researcher's knowledge, this is the first attempt to identify frugal ways to improve creativity, especially in SMEs.

E‐government implementation evolves through different stages of maturity, enforcing changes in strategies at each level. The transitions of service maturity phases pose continuous challenges to service providers in assessing the e‐service quality of web‐based services used in government. This study is conducted to propose a multi item scale for assessing the e‐service quality of government portals involving transactions.

Factors influencing the e‐service quality of government portals were identified from an extensive review of research performed by academic scholars and practitioners. A questionnaire was designed based on a review and interviews with users of e‐government applications and was used to conduct a survey of fully operational portals. Responses were obtained and quantitative analyses were performed on the data to develop a scale. This scale can help in evaluating citizen perceived quality of e‐services.

Seven constructs – i.e. citizen centricity, transaction transparency, technical adequacy, usability, complete information, privacy and security and usefulness of information – were identified from the analyses, which can be used to assess the demand side service quality of government portals.

Despite a well‐structured, national‐level plan on e‐government and adequate funding in India, most of the projects under the scheme are far below the expectation level of citizens. Technology‐enabled applications have promised easy access to government services with economic gain in certain cases, but they have not ensured citizens' satisfaction. Improved service quality based on citizens' need and expectation can reduce the gap between design and reality and act as positive trigger for adoption of e‐government. This study can help government portal developers get an insight into users' needs to improve the design and implementation of online services. The issues are significant and cannot be overlooked in practice.

The paper is original and a research study. It provides an understanding of citizens' perceived quality of e‐services and adoption behavior within the framework of the web‐based environment of government services.

This paper aims to research as to how Twitter is influential as an electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) communication tool and thereby affecting movie market. In present days, social media is playing an important role in connecting people around the globe. The technology has provided a platform in the social media space for people to share their experiences through text, photos and videos. Twitter is one such online social networking media that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Twitter has nearly 200 million users and billions of such tweets are generated by users every other day. Social media micro-blogging broadcasting networks such as Twitter are transforming the way e-WOM is disseminated and consumed in the digital world. Twitter social behaviour for the Hollywood movies has been assessed across seven countries to validate the two basic blocks of the honeycomb model – sharing and conversation. Twitter behaviour was studied for 27 movies in 22 different cities of seven countries and for six genres with a total tweets of 9.28 million. The difference of Twitter social media behaviour was compared across countries, and “sharing” and “conversation” as two building blocks of the honeycomb model were studied. t-Test results revealed that the behaviour is different across countries and across genres.

The objective of the paper is to analyse Twitter messages on an entertainment product (movies) across different regions of the world. Hollywood movies are released across different parts of the world, and Twitter users are also in different parts of the world. The objective is to hence validate “conversation” and “sharing” building blocks of the honeycomb model. The research is confined to analysing Twitter data related to a few Hollywood movies. The tweets were collected across nine different cities spanning four different countries where English language is prominent. To understand the Twitter social media behaviour, a crawler application using Python and Java was developed to collect tweets of Hollywood movies from the Twitter database. The application has incorporated Twitter application programming interfaces (APIs) to access the Twitter database to extract tweets according to movies search queries across different parts of the world. The searching, collecting and analysing of the tweets is a rather challenging task because of various reasons. The tweets are stored in a Twitter corpus and can be accessed by the public using APIs. To understand whether tweets vary from one country to another, the analysis of variance test was conducted. To assess whether Twitter behaviour is different, and to compare the behaviour across countries, t-tests were conducted taking two countries at a time. The comparisons were made across all the six genres. In this way, an attempt was made to obtain a microscopic view of the Twitter behaviour for each of the seven countries and the six genres.

The findings show that the people use social media across the world. Nearly 9.28 million tweets were from seven countries, namely, USA, UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, India and New Zealand for 27 Hollywood movies. This is indicative of the fact that today, people are exchanging information across different countries, that people are conversing about a product on social media and people are sharing information about a product on social media and, thus, proving the hypothesis. Further, the results indicate that the users in USA, Canada and UK, tweet more than the other countries, USA and UK being the highest in tweets followed by the Canada. On the other hand, the number of tweets in Australia, India and South Africa are low with New Zealand being the lowest of all the countries. This indicates that different countries’ users have different social media behaviour. Some countries use social media to communicate about their experience more than in some other country. However, consumers from all over the world are using Twitter to express their views openly and freely.

This research is useful to scholars and enterprises to understand opinions on Twitter social media and predict their impact. The study can be extended to any products which can lead to better customer relationship management. Companies can use the Internet and social media to promote and get feedback on their products and services across different parts of the world. Governments can inform the public about their new policies, benefits of governmental programmes to people and ways to improve the Internet reach to more people and also for creating awareness about health, hygiene, natural calamities and safety.

Block chain technology (BCT) has apparent capability of handling information in digital format, which has dragged attention of the practitioners for its utility in industrial and manufacturing practices. Conversely, the managerial adoption of BCT is relatively limited, which motivated the authors to identify crucial dimensions that can persuade the acceptance of BCT from an executive perspective. Thus, the present study is aimed to conduct to understand crucial barriers under BCT for managerial implementation in supply chain management (SCM) of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The present study investigated evident barriers to understand implementation of BCT. A questionnaire based survey is performed to collect primary data from service and manufacturing based companies in India. Survey responses are received online and the data is analyzed in a scorecard. The scorecard embedded the scribed entries of Likert scale to determine the relative score.

In present study, sixteen barriers from three categories named as technological, organizational and environmental are evaluated, where, five sub-barriers from technological domain, seven sub-barriers from organizational domain and four sub-barriers from environmental domain are evaluated. The findings of the study determined that the three factors, i.e. “complexity in setup/use”, “Security and privacy concern” and “Technological awareness” mostly affect the adaptation of BCT in SCM. Conversely, “Market dynamics”, “Scalability” and “Cost” do not influence the intention to adopt the technology.

Only few studies have endeavored to ascertain the BCT adoption in SCM of SMEs in developing country like India. Thus, the study is filling a momentous gap of mapping BCT dimensions in the scholastic literature. The findings are expected to enable SMEs to understand important factors to be considered for adopting BCT in their curriculum. Furthermore, the study may benefit the BCT developers and suppliers to endure customized solutions based on the findings.

A review of the emerging scholarly literature on positive organizational scholarship indicates a need to pursue cognitive, emotional and motivational mechanisms which translate into positive states and outcomes in organizations. Responding to this, this paper aims to test a mediation model linking resilience and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) through subjective well-being (SWB) components (i.e. life satisfaction and affect balance) and organizational commitment (OC) components.

Data were collected from 345 employees working in the Indian manufacturing industry. The study used structural equation modeling using AMOS to conduct bootstrapped mediation analyses.

Results showed that SWB and OC components mediated the resilience-OCB relationship. Results offered strong support for the role of affect balance (high positive and low negative affect) and affective commitment in mediating the influence of resilience on OCB.

The study not only tested the applicability of resilience in an organizational context to predict coveted positive outcomes but also identified the underlying mechanism as how psychological resource capacities like resilience contribute to OCBs.

The purpose of this paper is to present such an analytical framework for analyzing Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs) and to do a comparative analysis of a set of GIFs using the analytical framework. Based on the comparative analysis, the paper presents a set of recommendations useful for new GIF initiatives.

Drawing on literature and personal knowledge and experience, an analytical framework is proposed for qualitative comparison of GIFs. The analytical framework is based on three core areas of interoperability frameworks – context, content, and process. A total of 21 GIFs are analyzed and evaluated against the framework. The primary sources of information for the study are the interoperability framework documents. In some cases, published articles, brochures, etc. are used as additional sources of information.

The comparative analysis shows that the analytical framework adequately covers all the features of the GIFs. Comparative analysis also shows that most of the GIFs concentrate mainly on technical and syntactical aspects only. Organizational and semantic issues are covered only by a handful of GIFs. At the policy level, most common interoperability policies are found to be: the universal adoption of common specifications used on the internet and world wide web, use of XML for data integration and data management, and use of open standards for all public sector information systems. Regarding management of GIF, it is found that German, Greek and New Zealand GIFs document the process of standards life cycle management in a much better way, whereas UK e‐GIFs' coverage of management and compliance mechanism of GIF is excellent. Overall, it is found that the UK e‐GIF is one of the most mature and exhaustive on all counts. German – Standards und Architekturen f¨r eGovernment‐Anwendungen on the other hand is found to be a unique effort. It incorporates features of both an enterprise architecture and those of an interoperability framework.

The contribution of the study is substantial for academia and practitioners. For academics, this framework can be used in future research as a tool to benchmark and grade GIFs. The practitioners, on the other hand, can use the study, to identify various essential features of a GIF which can be very useful for new GIF initiatives. The six‐layered e‐government technical architecture discussed here can be used to check the current status of technical interoperability in an organization and to identify gaps in the technology coverage.

Indian higher education (HE) is arguably “in the doldrums.” Conformity to minimum standards and requirements combined with ever-eroding quality is the serious threats. Many researchers have suggested adopting a functional approach in universities and developing greater autonomy and accountability to improve the situation. The purpose of this paper is to deliberate on the introduction of an integrated way of making teachers more involved in their profession with the intention of enhancing the quality of education and research.

The paper’s argument conceptualizes the possibilities of the Indian HE system benchmarking the concept of high-performance teams (HTPs) as practiced in the industry.

Taking the support from the extant literature, it is proposed that working in HTPs have the potential to elevate the involvement level of the faculty. Furthermore, it is suggested that through the implementation of HTPs in educational settings, teachers would also be able to develop their competencies in relation to research activities.

The model presented in the study has the potential to be empirically tested for its validity and reliability, which opens vistas for future research.

This study aims to clarify how higher educational institutions (HEI now onwards) can engage in organizational learning process to implementing sustainability initiatives. Through the case study of business school in France, it shows how sustainability integration is a longitudinal process, influenced by contextual factors which facilitate and impede the learning process. It aims to contribute to the literature of sustainability in higher education by bringing in insights from organizational learning theory.

This research uses the case study method to analyze the sustainability integration over the specific period. To do so, data was compiled by analyzing internal documents, publicly available sustainability reports. Further data was also complimented by the interviews, which gave intra-organizational level insights.

The case highlights that organizational learning for sustainability is stimulated by deans, faculty and institute of sustainability. It provides insights about how designing and implementing sustainability initiatives within an HEI is not a fixed goal; on the contrary, it is an ongoing learning process. However, this learning is also prone to barriers due to the ambiguous nature of sustainability.

This research was conducted within a specific time, geographical and cultural context; hence, its result may lack generalization. Further comparative research is encouraged to explore similarity and differences within different HEI settings.

This research also gives potential insights for developing contextual awareness to prioritize, design and implement sustainability initiatives. Thus, it may be useful for the HEI administrators such as deans, sustainability managers and faculty members.

This case emphasizes that HEI like business schools need to expand their relevance via social responsibility. This could be done so by encouraging leadership to engage with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

This research uses organizational learning theory to understand determinants of sustainability design and implementation at French HEI. In doing so, this research contributes macro-level process of sustainability integration of an HEI.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework that would guide the practicing manager to decide the degree of information systems (IS) outsourcing.

The proposed framework has been derived from the findings of a previous empirical study and qualitative inputs. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is then used to apply the framework. The framework is finally validated in three India‐based banks.

The proposed framework helps in creating a strategic alignment between the business strategy and information system strategy. The application of the framework shows the preference of managers towards high IS outsourcing. Strategic alignment and medium term impact emerge the important factors in IS outsourcing. The validity of the framework is proved in three banks.

The validation exercise has been done on a small sample due to resources constraints and a study involving a larger sample is desired. Further, it is advised to review the framework on regular intervals and make suitable changes in decision factors.

The framework is helpful to managers in identifying the critical factors which can act as useful inputs in taking informed decisions on the degree of IS outsourcing.

The paper fills some of the gaps in IS outsourcing by suggesting a practice‐ oriented framework that guides the decision maker to undertake a systematic and structured approach in arriving at an outsourcing decision. The framework has evolved from the practices of banks in India for which there does not exist any similar research.