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3899 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2018

Children's media socialisation: Parental concerns and mediation in Iran

Melika Kordrostami, Akshaya Vijayalakshmi, and Russell N. Laczniak

Journal of Marketing Management

Children’s media socialisation, parental concerns, and mediation styles have been studied mainly in the US and Europe. The present research aims to extend media socialisation theory by investigating children’s media behaviour and parental concerns and mediation styles in Iran, and then to compare the findings with the research based on parents in Western countries. Based on in-depth interviews with parents from Iran, we put forth propositions and a media socialisation model. We find that parental concerns and behaviour are influenced by their cultural practices and expectations, government regulations, and media dominant in the local region.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Does the diversification – Firm performance relationship change over time?

Monika Schommer, Ansgar Richter, and Amit Karna

Journal of Management Studies

We study the relationship between diversification and firm performance in the context of the decline in levels of diversification over time. We argue that the pressure to reduce diversification may have more strongly affected those firms whose diversification strategies were most detrimental to firm performance. We employ meta-analytical regression (MARA) in order to test our hypotheses, using a total of 267 primary studies containing 387 effect sizes based on 150,000 firm-level observations from over 60 years of research on the diversification–firm performance relationship. The findings suggest that levels of unrelated diversification have decreased, whereas levels of related diversification have increased since the mid-1990s, following an initial decrease in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, we find that the relationship between unrelated diversification and firm performance has improved significantly over time, whereas the relationship between related diversification and performance has remained relatively stable.

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Journal Articles | 2018

How effective are disability sensitization workshops?

Mukta Kulkarni, Ansgar Richter, K.V. Gopakumar, and Shivani Patel

Employee Relations

Purpose

Organizations are increasingly investing in disability-specific sensitization workshops. Yet, there is limited understanding about their hoped outcomes, that is, increased knowledge about disability-related issues and behavioral changes with respect to those with a disability. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness and boundaries of disability-specific sensitization training in organizations.

Design/methodology/approach

This is an interview-based study where 33 employees from five industries across India were interviewed over the span of a year.

Findings

The findings suggest that sensitization workshops are successful with regard to awareness generation. Paradoxically, the same awareness also reinforced group boundaries through “othering.” Further, workshops resonated more so with individuals who already had some prior experience with disability, implying that voluntary sensitization is likely attracting those who have the least need of such sensitization. The findings also suggest that non-mandated interventions may not necessarily influence organizational level outcomes, especially if workshops are conducted in isolation from a broader organizational culture of inclusion.

Originality/value

The present study helps outline effects of sensitization training initiatives and enhances our understanding about how negative attitudes toward persons with a disability can be overcome. The study also indicates how such training initiatives may inadvertently lead to “othering.” Finally, this study offers suggestions to human resource managers for designing impactful disability sensitization workshops.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Impact of security expenditures in military alliances on violence From non-state actors: Evidence from India

Dhruv Gupta and Karthik Sriram

World Development

In this paper, we investigate the impact of security expenditures from military alliances involving third-party intervention on violent incidents from non-state actors. Our main learning is a rather surprising fact that at a lower level of security expenditure in the violence affected area, an increase in security expenditures leads to an increase in violent incidents (rather than a decrease); and only at higher level of security expenditure in the area, an increase in security expenditure leads to a decline in violent incidents. For the analysis, we use a novel dataset on naxalite violence obtained directly from the police head-quarters of the three most affected states in India. The data consists of 64 districts spanning over years 2001 till 2013 and includes information on the annual number of violent incidents and the size of the security forces allocated specifically to curb the naxalite violence. We use negative binomial regression model with the number of violent incidents as the dependent variable and lagged size of security forces as the independent variable, while controlling for other relevant variables. Further, to address issues of potential reverse causality, we use a propensity score matching technique to infer the causal nature of such an association.

We also argue that when the union government intervenes as a third party to support the state governments to fight the naxalites, the latter may be under-funding by free riding. However, despite such underfunding, if the overall contribution is positive and continued, eventually the concentration of security forces in an area will overwhelm the naxalites and reduce the incidents.

Lastly, we highlight that though the mainstream literature on civil wars has used per capita income as a proxy for security expenditures, it becomes inappropriate when a more direct measure of security expenditures is used.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Efficient mining of high utility itemsets with multiple minimum utility thresholds

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Mining high utility itemsets is considered to be one of the important and challenging problems in the data mining literature. The problem offers greater flexibility to a decision maker in using item utilities such as profits and margins to mine interesting and actionable patterns from databases. Most of the current works in the literature, however, apply a single minimum utility threshold value and fail to consider disparities in item characteristics. This paper proposes an efficient method (MHUI) to mine high utility itemsets with multiple minimum utility threshold values. The presented method generates high utility itemsets in a single phase without an expensive intermediate candidate generation process. It introduces the concept of suffix minimum utility and presents generalized pruning strategies for efficiently mining high utility itemsets. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated against the state-of-the-art methods (HUI-MMU-TE and HIMU-EUCP) on eight benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method delivers two to three orders of magnitude execution time improvement over the HUI-MMU-TE method. In addition, MHUI delivers one to two orders of magnitude execution time improvement over the HIMU-EUCP method, especially on moderately long and dense benchmark datasets. The memory requirements of the proposed algorithm was also found to be significantly lower.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Efficiently mining high utility itemsets with negative unit profits

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Knowledge-Based Systems

A High Utility Itemset (HUI) mining is an important problem in the data mining literature that considers utilities of items (such as profits and margins) to discover interesting patterns from transactional databases. Several data structures, pruning strategies and algorithms have been proposed in the literature to efficiently mine high utility itemsets. Most of these works, however, do not consider itemsets with negative unit profits that provide greater flexibility to a decision maker to determine profitable itemsets. This paper aims to advance the state-of-the-art and presents a generalized high utility mining (GHUM) method that considers both positive and negative unit profits. The proposed method uses a simplified utility-list data structure for storing itemset information during the mining process. The paper also introduces a novel utility based anti-monotonic property to improve the performance of HUI mining. Furthermore, GHUM adapts key pruning strategies from the basic HUI mining literature and presents new pruning strategies to significantly improve the performance of mining. The proposed method is evaluated on a set of benchmark sparse and dense datasets and compared against a state-of-the-art method. Rigorous experimental evaluation is performed and implications of the key findings are also presented. In general, GHUM was found to deliver more than an order of magnitude improvement at a fraction of the memory over the state-of-the-art FHN method.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Mining top-k high utility itemsets with effective threshold raising strategies

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Expert Systems With Applications

Top-K High Utility Itemset (HUI) mining problem offers greater flexibility to a decision maker in specifying her/his notion of item utility and the desired number of patterns. It obviates the need for a decision maker to determine an appropriate minimum utility threshold value using a trial-and-error process. The top-k HUI mining problem, however, is more challenging and requires use of effective threshold raising strategies. Several threshold raising strategies have been proposed in the literature to improve the overall efficiency of mining top-k HUIs. This paper advances the state-of-the-art and presents a new Top-K HUI method (THUI). A novel Leaf Itemset Utility (LIU) structure and a threshold raising strategy is proposed to significantly improve the efficiency of mining top-k HUIs. A new utility lower bound estimation method is also introduced to quickly raise the minimum utility threshold value. The proposed THUI method is experimentally evaluated on several benchmark datasets and compared against two state-of-the-art methods. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed THUI method offers one to three orders of magnitude runtime performance improvement over other related methods in the literature, especially on large, dense and long average transaction length datasets. In addition, the memory requirements of the proposed method are found to be lower.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Food value chain investments and the small farmer linkage: Indian experience, potential, and policy

Sukhpal Singh

World Food Policy

The agri-food value chains in the developing world are evolving fast due to many changes in policy and practice. In India, modern domestic food supermarkets have been present for more than 15 years now. Furthermore, in late 2012, foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail trade, including food, was permitted up to 51% of equity with other conditions of investment and operations. This paper tries to understand the role of investment (both domestic and foreign) in food/fibre value chains in improving the farmer/producer linkage. It uses empirical evidence from the experience of Indian domestic food retail supermarkets, and (mostly) foreign investment-based wholesale supermarkets in India, to examine the role such investments can play. It specifically examines the role and implications of investments in supermarkets for farmer income improvement, from a value chain perspective. It also explores various mechanisms which could be used to leverage the presence of such investments in food supermarkets and analyses the role of policy and regulation to promote/protect the small producer interests in food markets.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Land and livelihoods in rural India: Does farm size matter?

Sukhpal Singh

Indian Journal of Agricultural Marketing

This paper examines the question of role of land in rural livelihoods and that of small farms in the Indian smallholder and large landlessness context by focusing on the issue of size of the farm. It reviews evidence on the changing profile of farms globally and in India from the perspective of small and landless farmers. The paper argues that the size of the farm is not an issue for modern and sustainable agriculture and makes inferences about managing land in a sustainable way, including institutional approaches like group approaches and contract farming, from a smallholder and farm worker perspective.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Promoting and managing FPOs in India for efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability: Challenges, policies and best practices

Sukhpal Singh

Cooperative Perspective, Spl Issue(September)

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