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Working Papers | 2015

Price Movements of the Competing Airlines in the Indian Market: An Empirical Study (A)

Goutam Dutta and Sumitro Santra

In this paper, we analyze the price movements of the Indian domestic airline industry. In the first part, we conduct a detailed econometric analysis of five selected domestic routes. In the second part, we study the weekend effect on the average airfare. Our research suggests that competition steps up airfares as the departure date comes closer and weekend airfares are higher than weekday airfares. The application of Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing is the common practice in the Indian domestic airlines industry.

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Working Papers | 2014

Who fixes the meaning of time? Exercise of ideological power during the implementation of
Enterprise Resource Planning technology in a Western organization in India..

George Kandathil

Within the present context of globalization, the design of the IT system usually occurs in one country while its implementation takes place in several other countries. The implementing countries may have long-held time-related practices and understandings that contrast with the IT designing country. These contrasts can initiate ideological exercise of power in relation to meaning of time during IT implementation since IT artifacts embody designers' practices and the undelying belief system. This study examines such an exercise of power—an under-explored issue—using an in-depth longitudinal case study of the implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in a Western multinational organization in India. While the extant studies on the politics of technology change in organizations demonstrate how a discourse inscribes order and relations of power into a given technology, they rarely consider temporal aspects. On the other hand, the IT studies that examine the role of time in IT implementation do not focus on the exercise of power in relation to fixing and inscribing the meaning of time. Connecting these two disparate streams of scholarship, I show the simultaneous influence of two contrasting sets of meanings of time on the actors involved in the ERP implementation, the tensions that this contrast generates and the implications for customization of ERP package. Further, I demonstrate that ERP consultants exercise expert power not only using technical knowledge but also by highlighting and appropriating the discourses in the organization and the surrounding society. Thus, the study expands the current understanding about ERP consultants' exercise of expert power.

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Working Papers | 2014

FROM BEHAVIORAL COMPLIANCE TO VALUE INTERNALIZATION: The critical role of the match between employee's pre socialization habitual behavior and organization's expected employee behaviour

George Kandathil

This paper systematically explores the following under-examined question in social influence theories: can an individual's sustained behavioral compliance in an organizing context lead to internalization of the values underpinning the behavior. Particular focus is on the context where the value-to-be-internalized conflicts with the value that the individual has already internalized. I identify the boundary conditions within which this outcome can occur and the underlying social-psychological mechanisms that lead to such outcomes. To accomplish this, I develop propositions, drawing upon social influence theories and developments in critical sociology. I also provide guidelines to convert these propositions into hypotheses and test them. Finally, I discuss the implications of testing these hypotheses including a potential challenge to the dominant employee recruitment practice that HR professional usually adopt.

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Working Papers | 2014

Interactions between Collective Action Frame and Collective Action Framing: Exploring ERP Customization in an India-based Multinational Company

George Kandathil

The implementation of ERP software into organizations is widely recognized as contentious with different groups often requesting customization of the standard product to meet their particular needs and interests. Various efforts aimed at influencing the discourse and framing related to the ERP are therefore common in such implementation projects. Using an interpretive case study we examine the dynamics of such conflict, focusing on the process of framing meanings of ERP technology during an ERP implementation in an India based multinational company. In this exploration, we create a processual account of discursive framing through which a frame emerges around ERP - an IT artifact. This leads to a collective frame that eventually shapes the decision-conflict of adopting versus customizing the standard ERP artifact. Based on this account, we develop a dialogical approach to collective technology action framing that draws on the developments in social movement (SM) theory while addressing limitations of the dominant approaches to framing. We also develop a model that explicates the interaction between cognitive frame and discursive framing, clarifying an underexplored and unclear relationship in SM and IS framing literature. Finally, we highlight the role of perceived coercion in generating a widely shared meaning of ERP technology, foregrounding the relationship between coercion and consent

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Working Papers | 2014

A Multi-perspective integrated framework to study operations of power in organizations during technology-based change

George Kandathil

Attempts to develop an integrated framework to examine operations of power have always been challenging yet necessary, particularly in the context of technology-based organizational change. This paper begins with a highlight of the theoretical mismatch in an integrated theoretical framework that is widely used for examining operations of power during organizational change. Subsequently, drawing upon the recent works in political sociology on critical self-reflection, I propose to rectify the theoretical mismatch, resulting in a modified integrated framework. Further, using studies in social influence theories, I support the use of critical self-reflection as the integrating logic, which connects the framework to the semiotic exercise of power, making the integration more holistic. I illustrate the potential of this integrated framework to explain operations of power using a longitudinal case study of an implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning software package and the associated organizational change.

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Working Papers | 2014

Power Distance Beliefs and Attributions for Group Performance

Jack Goncalo and George Kandathil

We investigated how power distance beliefs shape attributions for group performance. Considerable research suggests that attributions for group performance may be focused either on (1) the contributions made by each individual member of the group or (2) the group as a whole. Yet to date there is no research to address whether or why people from different cultures might focus their attention on one type of attribution over the other. This gap is critical because different types of attributions for past group performance have been shown to influence subsequent group performance. In this paper, we develop a theory in which power distance beliefs are associated with a tendency to favor attributions focused on the individual over attributions focused on the group as a whole when explaining the causes of a collective outcome. The results of a scenario study conducted in both the United States and in India provided support for this prediction. This tendency is robust and holds when controlling for country of origin as well as perceptions of group performance, group member competence and group cohesion. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for attribution theory and for the management of teams in high power distance cultures

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Working Papers | 2014

Agribusiness Franchising in India:
Experience and Potential

Sukhpal Singh

Agribusiness or agricultural franchising is quite new in India, though it is quite commonly used in other businesses like fast food, hotel and other service industries where service quality is crucial to maintain brand equity. There have been only a few experiments in this field in the recent past by some corporate agencies, both private and public. This paper locates the rationale for franchising in agribusiness from global literature and from the Indian smallholder agricultural context where other ways of reaching small farmers or linking them with markets have not worked. It then analyses a few cases of failure and success in franchising in agribusiness by corporate agencies and compares and contrasts them for inferring on better management of franchising and its wider applicability in the Indian agribusiness context.

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Working Papers | 2014

Data Science for Decision Making in Developing Economies: A Travesty of Business Investments?

Arindam Banerjee

Based on a recent survey of Analytics Adoption in Indian business organization, the author makes a claim that for most organizations grappling with the problem of incomplete and unorganized data, the tools of data science are mostly unhelpful in providing impactful information for decision making.

What is required for most organizations embarking upon the Analytics journey is a strategic information plan which assesses requirement, availability and enhancement of information to support key decisions of the organization. This requires the generic skills of problem structuring and information resource identification and mapping them to business decision making. Knowledge of processing tools is important to the extent that information strategists are able to visualize what data and how to process them together to extract the right information.

Therefore the top most priority in organizations in nascent environments is to work towards building a necessary healthy ecosystem of information which in the future will facilitate more analytics driven decision making.

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Working Papers | 2014

An Efficient Solution Approach for Combinatorial Bandwidth Packing Problem with Queuing Delays

Sachin Jayaswal, Navneet Vidyarthi, and Sagnik Das

The Combinatorial bandwidth packing problem (CBPP), arising in a telecommunication network with limited bandwidth, is defined as: given a set of request, each with its potential revenue and consisting of calls with their bandwidth requirements, deciding (i) a subset of the requests to accept/reject, and (ii) a route for each call in an accepted request, so as to maximize total revenue earned. However, telecommunication networks are generally characterized by variability in the call (bits) arrival rates and service times, resulting in delays in the network. In this paper, we present a non-linear integer programming model for CBPP accounting for such delays. By using simple transformation and piecewise outer-approximation, we linearize the model, and present an efficient cutting plane based approach to solve the resulting linear mixed integer program to optimality.

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Working Papers | 2014

Assessing Impact of Mandatory CSR on Food Industry

Foram Mehta and Satish Y. Deodhar

India is the only country in the world which has now made CSR spending mandatory. Food industry is not an exception to this requirement. In a developing country like India, food industry has a larger social purpose, for food and nutrition are inextricably linked to hunger and health. At the same time, however, food firms are not philanthropic institutions either. We address the issue of whether or not making CSR activity mandatory has impacted the food industry negatively. Events that are expected to affect an industry negatively get reflected in significant lowering of firms' stock prices, for they capture the current and future profitability of firms. We conduct an event analysis by considering stock prices of food firms around two important events-passing of the CSR bill in two houses of parliament. We find that stock prices of select top performing food firms and select food firms that barely qualify for the CSR norms have not been adversely impacted by the two events. This means that food firms can turn mandatory CSR activities into an opportunity to build brand value. Using their core competence, they could spend on delivering nutrition-rich packaged foods, drinks, potable water, and neutraceuticals to disadvantaged communities.

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