Analysing critical success factors to implement sustainable supply chain practices in Indian automobile industry: a case study

The aim of this article is to analyse the critical success factors (CSFs) behind the successful implementation of sustainable supply chain practices in Indian automobile industry. Supply chain sustainability is a critical and timely topic for the developing country like India that captures increasing concerns over sustainability, whether driven by current legislation, public interest or competitive opportunity. Identification of CSFs responsible for sustainable supply chain practices and evaluating their contextual relationships has the potential to affect future government policy, current production operations and identify new business models. In response to this, this paper intends to identify CSFs based on organisational theory and model them to implement sustainable supply chain practices in Indian automobile industry. Twenty-five CSFs to implement sustainable supply chain practices based on organisational theory are recognised by means of the literature review and in discussions with experts in one case study organisation. A solution methodology based on the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique is used to propose a structural model, which not only helps in understanding the contextual relationship among these CSFs, but also in determining their interdependence to implement sustainable supply chain practices. Further, the importance of CSFs has been determined based on their driving and dependence power using MICMAC analysis. Our overarching thesis is that the insights gained are useful for Indian automobile industry and would help practitioners, regulators and academicians to focus their efforts towards implementation of sustainable supply chain practices.     

Socioeconomic determinants of the intra-family status of wives in rural India: Analysis and empirical evidence

Relying on a structured survey of 117 wives in four rural villages in the Midnapore District of West Bengal, this article investigates the influence on the intra-family status of wives of variables that may increase the bargaining power of wives in their family. Saveral indicators of status are considered and investigated using the ANOVA technique and probit analysis. The main hypothesis considered is whether the results support bargaining theories of the intra-household status of wives or the view that gender status is primarily determined in Indian society by social customs and the patriarchal structure of society. Given the overall patriarchal structure of Indian society, the results indicate that bargaining theories are at best only marginally relevant. Situations that result in greater bargaining power for wives in Western societies do not necessarily do so in north India given the total pervasiveness of its patriarchal society. Research for this paper benefited from a grant by the Australian Research Committee     

The imagined futures of the public university in India

Through an engagement with James Mittelman’s Implausible Dream: The World Class University and Repurposing Higher Education, this paper tracks the journey of the idea of World Class Universities in India, and its most recent iteration in the form of Institutions of Eminence. The structural crisis of governance in the public university system is related to the overweening role of the state in every aspect of its functioning, with the University Grants Commission failing to perform its role as a buffer between government and university. The paper examines two recent initiatives of the government: the proposed replacement of the University Grants Commission by a Higher Education Commission of India and the initiative to support select Institutions of Eminence to achieve world class status. The core attraction of this initiative is its promise of autonomy, and this idea of autonomy is critically interrogated here, including in its ambivalent relationship to academic freedom.     

Poverty as a System: Human Contestability Approach to Poverty Measurement

Since Sen's (1976) paper on poverty measurement, a substantial literature, both theoretical and empirical, has emerged. There have been several recent efforts to drive poverty measures based on different approaches and axioms. These poverty indices are based on head count ratio, poverty gaps and distribution of income. These are very narrow in approach and suffer from several drawbacks. However, the purpose of the present paper is to introduce a new poverty measure based on a holistic and system modelling approach. Based on Chopra's human contestability (Chopra, 2003, 2007) approach to poverty, this new approach to measuring poverty has been developed using a structure equation model based on Kanji's business excellence model (Kanji, 2002) to create the proposed poverty model. We construct a latent variable structural equation model to measure the contestability excellence within certain boundaries of the societal system. It will provide us with a measurement of poverty in a society or community in terms of human contestability. A higher human contestability index will indicate the lower poverty within the society. Strengths and weakness as of various components will also indicate that a characteristic of the individual requires extra society or government support to remove poverty. However, there remains considerable disagreement on the best way to achieve this.     

Design Improvements for Message Propagation in Malleable Social Networks

This study presents the formal problem definition and computational analysis of the network design improvements for idea and message propagation in both enterprise and consumer social networks (ESN and CSN, respectively). Message propagation in social networks is impacted by how messages are seeded in the network, and by propagation characteristics of the network topology itself. It has been recognized that the propagation properties of these networks can be actively influenced by network design interventions, such as the deliberate creation of new connections. We address the problem of finding cost‐effective message seeding, and identifying potential new network connections that allow improved propagation in social networks with cascade propagation. We use the hop‐constrained minimum spanning tree (HMST) model to find the seeds and possible new connections that result in networks with improved propagation properties. Moreover, we present new heuristic algorithms that substantially improve the solution quality for the HMST problem. Computational results posit that the design improvements proposed by the HMST approach can greatly improve cascade propagation performance of the networks at low cost.     

E‐Procurement Infusion and Operational Process Impacts in MRO Procurement: Complementary or Substitutive Effects?

The procurement of maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) goods has remained a relatively understudied topic in the literature. Though vital cost efficiencies can be extracted from procurement processes through investments in e‐procurement systems, there is little empirical work that addresses how such systems should be deployed within organizations. In this study, we focus on the role of e‐procurement systems in MRO procurement and study two critical aspects of infusion. The first dimension captures the depth of e‐procurement use within the procurement function, while the second dimension depicts the breadth of use. We argue that these two dimensions of e‐procurement use, and their interaction, will be related to the performance of the MRO procurement process. Using survey data from 193 service organizations and structural equation modeling techniques, we show that the two infusion dimensions are significantly associated with improved process performance. Additionally, we show a substantial substitutive effect between the two use dimensions on performance. Our work has significant implications for managers who seek to gain efficiencies by the deployment of Internet‐based technologies within operational processes. Our conceptualization of e‐procurement infusion along two dimensions provides a more fine‐grained analysis of performance benefits accruing from the infusion of information technologies within organizations.     

Coefficient of variation for the L-class of life distributions

It is shown that the coefficient of variation for the L-class of life distributions is less than or equal to 1.We prove that a d.f. F, belonging to the L-class of life distributions , is exponential if and only if its coefficient of variation is equal to 1.