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3853 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2020

Money, land or self-employment? Understanding preference heterogeneity in landowners’ choices for compensation under land acquisition in India

Vikram Patil, Ranjan Ghosh, Vinish Kathuria, and Katharine N.Farrell

Land Use Policy

Land acquisition policies, upon which future land use patterns in India depend, are controversially tied to the question of whether to provide monetary or non-monetary compensation to affected landowners. However, turning to the preferences of landowners for answers only serves to complicate matters, as these are not homogenous on the question. This implies there is a need to identify the underlying factors giving rise to this preference heterogeneity, in order to develop more effective and efficient policy. This paper aims to address this gap using a contingent ranking experiment to study landowner disposition toward a range of compensation options, presented in a survey conducted in an ‘about-to-be-submerged’ region of a large, multi-stage irrigation project in India. Rankings were based on a selection of six compensation options, constituting different combinations of the attributes - cash, land, housing and self-employment. While the results suggest that landowners generally prefer non-monetary compensation, both the size of landholding and level of education of the landholder appear to influence the preferences for different compensation options. We find that landowners with more land or education tended to favour monetary compensation, while those with lower education or less land tended to favour housing and self-employment options. We close the text by exploring possible explanations for this specific form of heterogeneity, including access to information, to networks and capacities for income generation, and providing some reflections on the implications of these results for ensuring that rehabilitation and resettlement policies are both well targeted and effective.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Bother me only if the client complains: control and resistance in home-based telework in India

Dharma Raju Bathini and George Mathew Kandathil

Employee Relations: The International Journal

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between operations of organization control and workers’ response to them in case of telework, a technology-embedded new way of working.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors adopted an interpretive approach to explore control and home-based teleworkers’ response in the Indian information technology industry. Interviews and non-participant observations were analysed using constructivist grounded theory.

Findings

The discourse of “telework as a privilege” served as a basis for normative control, helping managers exercise increased technocratic control. Combined with the discourse of “self-responsibility to client”, it led teleworkers to self-subjugate to long/unsocial work hours. However, the simultaneous exercise of technocratic and normative controls resulted in an inconsistency, creating space for teleworker’s resistance to technocratic control. Nonetheless, resistance to technocratic control ironically reinforced normative control.

Originality/value

The authors contribute to the recent discussion on compatibility and coherence of multiple control modes, and their relationship to resistance. The authors show how workers’ selves can be compatible with one control mode while being incompatible with other modes. The authors argue that when workers’ experience incoherence between control modes, they can appropriate the logic underlying compatible control mode(s) to resist incompatible control mode(s). Further, the authors demonstrate how resistance to incompatible control mode(s) can ironically reinforce compatible control mode(s), and thus explicate the micro-processes of control-resistance dialectic. Advancing the emergent understanding of resistance, the authors show that resistance is an exercise of strategic counter-power that seeks to exploit incoherence between control modes and inconsistencies between actions and rhetoric.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Performance Behavior of participatory water institutions in Eastern India: A study through structural equation modelling

Nicky Johnson, Vasant P. Gandhi, and Dinesh Jain

Water (Switzerland)

The paper examines the nature and performance of participatory water institutions in eastern India using structural equation modelling. There is a crisis in the management of water in India, and this is often not about having too little water but about managing it poorly. It is now being widely recognized that engineering structures and solutions are not enough, and having effective water institutions is critical. These are urgently needed in eastern India for helping lift the region out of low incomes and poverty. However, creating good institutions is complex, and in this context, the fundamentals of new institutional economics, and management governance theory have suggested the importance of a number of key factors including five institutional features and eight rationalities. Based on this, a study was conducted in eastern India, sampling from the states of Assam and Bihar, covering 510 farm households across 51 water institutions. In order to understand and map the relationship and pathways across these key factors, a structural equation model is hypothesized. In the model, the five institutional features are considered determinants of the eight rationalities, and the rationalities are considered determinants of four performance goals. The performance on the goals determines the overall performance/success of the institution. Besides this, the institutional features and rationalities can also directly influence performance on the goals and the overall performance. The model is tested with data from the survey and different pathways that are robust are identified. The results can provide useful insights into the interlinkages and pathways of institutional behavior and can help policy and institution design for delivering more robust performance. The results show that one of the most important factors determining overall performance/success is technical rationality, and this deserves great attention. It includes technical expertise, sound location and quality of structures and equipment, and good maintenance. However, success is also strongly linked to performance on production/income goals, equity, and environment goals. These are, in turn, strongly related to achievement of economic, social, technical, and organizational rationalities, which call for attention to economic aspects such as crop choice and marketing, besides social aspects such as inclusion of women and poorer social groups, and organizational aspects such as member involvement and regular meetings. Further, the institutional features of clear objectives, good interactions, adaptive, correct scale, and compliance are important for achievement of almost all rationalities through various pathways, and should be strongly focused on in all the institutions.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Getting the measurement right! quantifying time poverty and multitasking from childcare among mothers with children across different age groups in rural north India

Laili Irani and Vidya Vemireddy

Asian Population Studies

Existing research suggests that women spend a disproportionate amount of time on unpaid housework and childcare compared to men. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on unequal time burdens due to childcare among women. This study analyses the quantum of time poverty and multitasking behaviours of 3623 rural women with children of varying ages across rural North India. Findings show that mothers with infants spend more time on childcare and less time on self-care and leisure, and employment-related activities as compared to mothers with older children; they also multitask with childcare more than mothers of older children across all their daily activities. Our findings suggest that interventions and policies need to be designed to raise awareness, identify/adopt novel approaches and technologies to reduce work burden of unpaid work on women’s time, provide accessible childcare and encourage a more equitable distribution of household responsibilities.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Engagement patterns of participants in an online professional development programme: An application of mixture modelling

Ketan S. Deshmukh, Vijaya Sherry Chand, Kathan D. Shukla, and Arnab K. Laha

Proceedings Of The Annual Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences

Unhindered communication capabilities, in the form of internet, led us to believe that the difficult goal of “Education for All” is within our grasps. Recent studies have shown mixed results for learning over the internet, indicating that we are still far away from our desired goal. Online environments provide freedom to large number of learners, to learn at their own pace. Understanding the various ways in which participants engage with online content could help explain the mixed outcomes. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study on engagement patterns of 4567 elementary school teachers, in an online professional development programme. Using mixture modelling techniques, we identified five latent profiles of online engagement and seven latent classes based on off-platform activities. We present our findings followed by discussion and implications for online courses.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Geographical dissimilarity and team member influence: Do emotions experienced in the initial team meeting matter

Vishal Gupta, Prithviraj Chattopadhyay, and Elizabeth George

Academy of Management Journal

It is both important and challenging to gain influence within geographically diverse teams. We argue that the emotions team members experience in their initial team meetings moderate the effect of geographical dissimilarity on their perceived influence on team decisions over time. Specifically, we contrast social identity theory–based arguments that geographical dissimilarity negatively influences perceived influence with self-categorization theory–based arguments that there is a positive relationship between geographical dissimilarity and perceived influence. We argue that the emotions team members experience in their initial meeting determine which of these relationships eventuate over time. Across two studies, our data support our arguments. We find that for individuals experiencing pleasant high-activation emotions, their geographic dissimilarity was more positively related with perceived influence in the initial stage of a project; for those experiencing unpleasant low-activation emotions, their geographic dissimilarity was positively related with perceived influence in the later stage; for those experiencing unpleasant high-activation emotions, their geographic dissimilarity was initially positively and later negatively related with perceived influence.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Breaking “bad” links: Impact of Companies Act 2013 on the Indian corporate network

Mayank Aggarwal, Anindya Chakrabarti, and Pritha Dev

Social Networks

Journal Articles | 2020

A constrained agglomerative clustering approach for unipartite and bipartite networks with application to credit networks

Samrat Gupta and Pradeep Kumar

Information Sciences

Researchers and practitioners have been interested in solving real-world problems through clustering. The clustering of nodes in networks with unipartite or bipartite structure is important to explore real-world complex networks present in nature and society. Bipartite networks form an important class of complex networks because they reveal the heterogeneity of nodes in a network. However, most extant clustering methods focus only on unipartite networks. In this work, a novel constrained agglomerative clustering method applicable to unipartite and bipartite networks has been proposed. Initially, the topology of a network is modeled according to set-theoretic principles. Subsequently, the concepts related to rough set theory and relative linkage are used to cluster the set of nodes. The utility and effectiveness of the proposed approach are demonstrated through offline experiments on unipartite and bipartite networks. A comparison against ten state-of-the-art similarity measures over two different partitional clustering algorithms reveals the effectiveness of the proposed relative linkage measure. Moreover, a comparative analysis with state-of-the-art network clustering methods reveals the viability of the proposed rough set-based constrained agglomerative clustering algorithm. Finally, the proposed method has been applied for the detection of cohesive subgroups of banks in a real bipartite network formed by mapping credit relationships between Indian firms and banks.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Social connections and tertiary health-care utilization

Tarun Jain and Sisir Debnath

Health Economics

The use of tertiary health care by socially proximate peers helps individuals learn about program and treatment procedures, signals that using such care is socially appropriate, and could support the use of formal health care, all of which could increase program utilization. Using complete administrative claims data from a publicly financed tertiary care program in India, we estimate that the elasticity of first-time claims with respect to claims by members of caste groups within the village is 0.046, with smaller effects of more socially distant individuals. The point elasticity of inpatient care expenditure with respect to claims filed by the same group in village peers in the previous quarter is Image removed.0.035. We find support for an information channel as peers increase awareness of the program and its features. Our findings have implications for the development of network-based models to determine health-care demand, as well as in use of network-based targeting to boost tertiary health-care utilization.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Modeling and design of container terminal operations

Debjit Roy, Rene De Koster, and Rene Bekker

Operations Research

The design of container terminal operations is complex because multiple factors affect operational performance. These factors include numerous choices for handling technology, terminal topology, and design parameters and stochastic interactions between the quayside, stackside, and vehicle transport processes. In this research, we propose new integrated queuing network models for rapid design evaluation of container terminals with automated lift vehicles and automated guided vehicles. These models offer the flexibility to analyze alternate design variations and develop insights. For instance, the effect of different vehicle dwell point policies is analyzed using state-dependent queues, whereas the efficient terminal layout is determined using variation in the service time expressions at the stations. We show the relation among the dwell point–dependent waiting times and also show their asymptotic equivalence at heavy traffic conditions. These models form the building blocks for design and analysis of large-scale terminal operations. We test the model efficacy using detailed in-house simulation experiments and real-terminal validation by partnering with an external party.

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