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849 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2018

Teamwork of temporary employees: multiple perspectives

Saikat Chakraborty and Sushmita Chakravarti

Human Resource Management International Digest

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to understand the teamwork of temporary employees by taking into consideration the impact and role of the management’s perspective, temporary employee’s perspective and contextual perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on reviews of workplace literature pertaining to temporary employments, conversations with managers and temporary and permanent employees of organizations engaging temporary employees on a perennial basis have been thematically analyzed.

Findings

Multiple perspectives of teamwork of temporary employees exist in organizations. However, one rarely finds the interaction and collective treatment of these perspectives, which are critical to understanding teamwork of temporary employees. The paper reports on these perspectives.

Practical implications

With rise in temporary employments in organizations and teamwork being crucial to participative work cultures, organizations need to consider multiple perspectives of the phenomenon before making an informed decision.

Originality/value

There is limited research that delves into teamwork of temporary employees despite the phenomenon becoming increasingly significant in organizations. This paper offers an approach to look at teamwork of temporary employees through multiple perspectives.

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Journal Articles | 2018

The Aadhaar Debate: Where are the sociologists?

Reetika Khera

Contribution to Indian Sociology

The Aadhaar project which aims to provide all residents in India with a unique identity number requires much more attention from sociologists of India. There are several areas of research where sociologists can help: one, the implications of new technologies of surveillance for (a) privacy and (b) society; two, the repercussions of the desire for social ordering and control and technocratic solutionism for people in their interactions with the state demands fuller sociological study. This brief note attempts to outline some of the issues that call out for enquiry.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Estimating labour quality index for India

Ravindra H. Dholakia and Kadiyala Virinchi S

Economic and Political Weekly

Using the latest consumer price index (combined) series, it is found that the dynamics underlying India’s inflationary process have changed substantially. Significant reduction found in the inflation persistence reflects anchoring of inflationary expectations. Moreover, it is the headline inflation that reverts to the core and not vice versa, as was assumed so far. It implies the absence of any significant second-round effects. These features need to be taken into account for any policy analysis. Attempting to forecast inflation using various econometric techniques, it is found that a combination of alternative models based on mean square errors improves forecast accuracy as compared to any individual model.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Estimating labour quality index for India.

Ravindra H. Dholakia

Journal of Labour Economics

Present paper provides a detailed critique of the traditional methodology of taking wage differential as equal to the differential of marginal productivity of labour and proposes to replace it by the differential of average productivity of labour types. The purpose in this paper is not to provide a concrete estimate of the labour quality index, but to discuss possibility of following an alternative method and expand the scope of measurement from the traditional age–sex–education classification to a wider range including some directly non-quantifiable labour qualities. The traditional method and the previous efforts made in India ignored classifications of workers based on the urban–rural residence, organized–unorganized sectors, public versus private sector employment, self-employed versus hired workers versus casual employees, and health and nutritional status. If all these qualitative aspects are properly considered, we can get a reasonably accurate marginal contribution of formal education, urbanization, privatization, self-employment and health and nutrition status of workers to the economic growth.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Employees' Provident Fund Organization: Empowering members by digital transformation

Ravichandran Narasimhan, Joy P. Vazhayil, and Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Journal of Public Affairs

Employees' Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) was established by the Government of India with the purpose of ensuring financial and social security for industrial workers and their dependents. With more than 150 million accounts of its members, EPFO is the world's largest social security organization. Operational processes of EPFO were riddled with over emphasis on rules and regulations but were weak on transparency, accountability, effectiveness, and efficiency. Consequently, the primary purpose of social security of industrial employees was compromised. Business process reengineering combined with adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and social media brought a sea change to the functioning of EPFO. This paper documents the transformation of EPFO from a bureaucratic, opaque organization to a customer-centric, stakeholder-friendly, transparent, and accountable organization.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Food waste due to retail power in suppy chains: Evidence from Sweden

Ranjan Ghosh and Mattias Eriksson

Global Food Security

Trading practices such as the take-back agreement (TBA) can become a tool for retailers to exert coercive power over suppliers when market concentration is high. We explore the implications of TBAs for the Swedish bread industry using unique company data from a premium bread supplier and find that powerful buyers over-order and, thereby, waste. This supplier faced 30% returns on total volume produced in the period 2011–2015 and had to bear the entire cost of bread rejections, collection and disposal. It received payment only for bread sold to end-customers, not the quantity supplied. To our knowledge, this is first time there is substantial evidence of the negative consequences such trading practices lead to with respect to waste. The EU has been considering banning the practices of ‘forcing the supplier to pay for wasted product’ and ‘a buyer returning unsold food products to the supplier’. However, such behaviour is very difficult to prove, given that suppliers-buyers are either tied up with bilateral confidential contracts or operate under relational norms. Yet, TBAs are common in certain food supply chains, presenting a global challenge for prevention of food waste and requiring deeper policy engagement.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Exploring linkages between industrial innovation and public policy: Challenges and opportunities

Rakesh Basant

Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers

It is widely understood now that innovation is critical for development and growth of an economy. World over, governments have worked with a variety of policies to encourage innovative activity. Significant research has gone into the analysis of the complex linkages between public policy and innovation. While this research has generated a lot of interesting insights, it has also identified several gaps in our understanding of these linkages. This article is an attempt to pool together some of the ideas that academic research has highlighted on the linkages between innovation and public policy and identify the current challenges as well as opportunities for meaningfully exploring these linkages further. While it draws a lot on existing studies, the article does not provide a comprehensive or rigorous review of the literature on this subject. It is, at best, a tentative attempt to provide a broad perspective on where we stand vis-à-vis our understanding on the relationship between innovation and public policy. And admittedly, it is one of the many perspectives that a researcher can potentially have on this complex relationship.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Telemedicine for low resource settings: Exploring the generative mechanisms

Rajesh Chandwani and Rahul De

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

Information Communication and Technology for Health (ICT4H) initiatives, such as telemedicine, can potentially bridge the gap between the health care services available in rural and urban areas. However most of such initiatives have not been able to sustain or obtain optimal results. Comprehending knowledge about what drives success in telemedicine initiatives would be highly valuable for practitioners, policymakers and academicians. In this study, through a qualitative analysis of doctor-patient interactions over a telemedicine initiative in India, we attempt to identify the mechanisms that can enable successful telemedicine interventions. Based on the perspective of critical realism, we explore the phenomenon through the lens of ‘generative mechanisms’. Specifically, we identify three different mechanisms that underlie successful telemedicine, namely, (1) Mechanism of rich connectivity, which refers to the expanding scope of information flow between the nodes to include multiple aspects- clinical, managerial and technological; and both online and offline communication; (2) Mechanism of tutoring, which involves learning and skill development of the peripheral doctor; and (3) Mechanism of moulding, which concerns the moulding of naïve patients to expert patients, both in technology use and self management of disease. In addition, the paper demonstrates the efficacy of critical realism as a philosophical perspective for providing substantive insights in the field of ICT4H initiatives.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Energy system transitions and macroeconomic assessment of the Indian building sector

Saritha S. Vishwanathan, Panagiotis Fragkos, Kostas Fragkiadakis, Leonidas Paroussos, and Amit Garg

Building Research & Information

India’s energy sector has grown rapidly in recent years with buildings playing a major role as they constitute about 40% of India’s final energy demand. This paper provides a quantitative model-based assessment of the evolution of India’s building sector in terms of both energy systems transition and its macroeconomic implications. The coupling of a bottom-up technology-rich energy system model with a macroeconomic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model provides an innovative approach for the in-depth robust analysis of the energy transition in India’s building stock and the induced macroeconomic and employment impacts on the Indian economy. Two main scenarios are explored, namely: the business-as-usual (BAU) and the advanced nationally determined contribution (Adv. NDC) scenarios. The investigation shows that efficiency improvements are vital to counteract the upward pressure on energy demand in the building sector. Energy demand in the building sector results in an increase of CO2 emissions by 27% between 2015 and 2030 due to the technology transition from inefficient solid fuels (traditional biomass) to cleaner energy (liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), piped natural gas (PNG)) before shifting to electricity. The Adv. NDC scenario also leads to a shift in employment from agriculture and towards sectors that benefit from the implementation of Adv. NDC, especially in the construction sectors, electricity and manufacturing sectors.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Networks of information exchange: Are link formation decisions strategic?

Pritha Dev

Economic Letters

This paper presents an empirical investigation into whether the decision to form a link with a node takes into account how well connected that node is. Given data in the form of a random sample from a network, this paper proposes a novel way to measure the degree of a node to adjust for mismeasurement and also controls for the endogeneity of this variable. It is shown that in fact the probability of forming a link with a node is increasing in the links received by that node but decreasing or unaffected by the links made by that node.

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IIMA