Search results

In India, national accreditation agencies stipulate that internal quality control in higher education institutions (HEIs) is to be institutionalized through internal quality assurance cells that are responsible for implementing and controlling quality systems. As the concept of goal congruence is central to a control process, this study aims to examine whether goal congruence is observed in such institutions. The impact of the absence of goal congruence on the quality of performance in higher education was also examined.

This cross-sectional study measured the impact of goal congruence or the lack thereof on the performance quality of HEIs as defined in the evaluation criteria of the apex accreditation agency, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council. Two hypotheses were tested using t-tests and regression analysis. Focus group discussions were conducted to elicit participants’ suggestions.

The results showed a lack of goal congruence between HEIs’ quality goals and their faculty’s personal goals, which adversely impacts the quality of their performance, as indicated by an average disagreement of 81% on a ten-statement scale. Goal congruence as an independent variable explained 63% of the variability in HEIs’ performance quality, and the results were statistically significant, indicating that lack of goal congruence is an important contributor to poor performance among HEIs.

Accreditation of HEIs is a global practice; hence, the findings of this study and the importance of goal congruence apply not only to India but also to HEIs globally.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the status of institutional repositories (IRs) in the South Asian region. The various characteristic features of IRs are studied.

Open directory of open access repositories (DOAR) as a data-gathering tool was consulted for extracting the desired data.

India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh lead other South Asian nations in terms of IRs count. Majority of the IRs are operational in nature with higher number of operational IRs from India. In terms of record count, India leads the list. “Journal articles” outscore other content type and majority of the IRs have OAI-PMH as their base URL. DSpace stays a prioritized software for content management in IRs. Majority of the IRs have not defined their content management policies. English stays a prioritized language of the content dotting the South Asian IRs and majority of the IRs not providing usage statistics. A good score of IRs has incorporated Web 2.0 tools in them with RSS as the preferred Web 2.0 tool. A good count of the IRs has not customized their interface. Majority of the IRs have interface in two languages.

The main limitation of the study is that the findings of the research are based on the data collected through the repositories indexed by Open DOAR.

The study tries to explore the characteristic features of IRs from the South Asian region.

Different pollutants emission due to the conventional energy consumption process is of major concern owed to its significant effect on human health vis-à-vis regional climate. The purpose of this paper is to develop mitigation strategies to reduce the pollutant concentrations in the rural households conducted in a pristine rural village of Indian Sunderban area.

During winter, 2014, 20 households which were using traditional biomass cookstove for cooking and kerosene-lamp for lighting (KIT-TRD) were randomly selected. Specific type of improved forced draft biomass cookstove and solar lantern were used in ten of the selected households (KIT-IMP). Real time concentrations of particulate matter (PM) (PM_2.5, PM₁₀) and carbon monoxide (CO) during day and evening time cooking period were measured in KIT-IMP and KIT-TRD. A simulation model was established to evaluate most potential factor to control the level of pollutants inside the kitchen.

Conventional processes of energy consumption in the households, along with the outdoor concentration of pollutants influence the indoor concentration of measured pollutants. The concentration of PM and CO was significantly lower in the KIT-IMP than the other. In the KIT-TRD households, the daytime concentration of PM and CO was significantly higher compared to the evening. The simulated output overestimated the concentration of PM10 and CO in the KIT-TRD.

The concentration of PM_2.5, PM₁₀ and CO significantly reduces in the indoor environment with the introduction of improved cookstove and solar lantern; however, further research is required to develop optimum sizes of window and door in the rural households to reduce the concentrations of different pollutants inside the kitchen.

Today, most of the manufacturing systems are changing very fast in terms of the adoption of new technologies. New technologies being implemented are Internet of Things, cyber physical systems, cloud computing, Big Data analytics and information and communication technologies. Most of the organizations in the value chain are implementing these technologies at the individual level rather than across the whole supply chain. It makes the supply chain less coordinated and causes suboptimal utilization of resources. For efficient and optimal use of modern technologies, supply chains should be highly coordinated. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate an approach for determining the index to quantify coordination in the supply chain.

From the literature review, total 32 factors have been identified. These factors are further clubbed into six clusters for evaluation of the coordination index. The graph theoretic approach has been used for evaluating the coordination index of a supply chain of an Indian organization.

This study has illustrated a comprehensive approach to quantify coordination of a supply chains for effective benchmarking of the supply chain performance in the Industry 4.0 era. Presently, it is observed that top management is giving more focus on organizational issues such as lean organization structure, organization culture and responsiveness factors for improving coordination in the supply chain rather than on Industry 4.0 technologies.

This framework can also be used for comparison, ranking and analysis of coordination issues in different supply chains in the era of Industry 4.0. Organizations can use this approach for benchmarking purpose also to improve different supply chain processes for meeting dynamic market requirements.

This study investigates the impact of the fire decay phase on structural damage using the sectional analysis method. The primary objective of this work is to forecast the non-dimensional capacity parameters for the axial and flexural load-carrying capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) sections for heating and the subsequent post-heating phase (decay phase) of the fire.

The sectional analysis method is used to determine the moment and axial capacities. The findings of sectional analysis and heat transfer for the heating stage are initially validated, and the analysis subsequently proceeds to determine the load capacity during the fire’s heating and decay phases by appropriately incorporating non-dimensional sectional and material parameters. The numerical analysis includes four fire curves with different cooling rates and steel percentages.

The study’s findings indicate that the rate at which the cooling process occurs after undergoing heating substantially impacts the axial and flexural capacity. The maximum degradation in axial and flexural capacity occurred in the range of 15–20% for cooling rates of 3 °C/min and 5 °C/min as compared to the capacity obtained at 120 min of heating for all steel percentages. As the fire cooling rate reduced to 1 °C/min, the highest deterioration in axial and flexural capacity reached 48–50% and 42–46%, respectively, in the post-heating stage.

The established non-dimensional parameters for axial and flexural capacity are limited to the analysed section in the study owing to the thermal profile, however, this can be modified depending on the section geometry and fire scenario.

The study primarily focusses on the degradation of axial and flexural capacity at various time intervals during the entire fire exposure, including heating and cooling. The findings obtained showed that following the completion of the fire’s heating phase, the structural capacity continued to decrease over the subsequent post-heating period. It is recommended that structural members' fire resistance designs encompass both the heating and cooling phases of a fire. Since the capacity degradation varies with fire duration, the conventional method is inadequate to design the load capacity for appropriate fire safety. Therefore, it is essential to adopt a performance-based approach while designing structural elements' capacity for the desired fire resistance rating. The proposed technique of using non-dimensional parameters will effectively support predicting the load capacity for required fire resistance.

The fire-resistant requirements for reinforced concrete structures are generally established based on standard fire exposure conditions, which account for the fire growth phase. However, it is important to note that concrete structures can experience internal damage over time during the decay phase of fires, which can be quantitatively determined using the proposed non-dimensional parameter approach.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the literature around regulatory compliance and market manipulation in capital markets through the use of bibliometrics and propose future research directions. Under the domain of capital markets, this theme is a niche area of research where greater academic investigations are required. Most of the research is fragmented and limited to a few conventional aspects only. To address this gap, this study engages in a large-scale systematic literature review approach to collect and analyze the research corpus in the post-2000 era.

The big data corpus comprising research articles has been extracted from the scientific Scopus database and analyzed using the VoSviewer application. The literature around the subject has been presented using bibliometrics to give useful insights on the most popular research work and articles, top contributing journals, authors, institutions and countries leading to identification of gaps and potential research areas.

Based on the review, this study concludes that, even in an era of global market integration and disruptive technological advancements, many important aspects of this subject remain significantly underexplored. Over the past two decades, research has lagged behind the evolution of capital market crime and market regulations. Finally, based on the findings, the study suggests important future research directions as well as a few research questions. This includes market manipulation, market regulations and new-age technologies, all of which could be very useful to researchers in this field and generate key inputs for stock market regulators.

The limitation of this research is that it is based on Scopus database so the possibility of omission of some literature cannot be completely ruled out. More advanced machine learning techniques could be applied to decode the finer aspects of the studies undertaken so far.

Increased integration among global markets, fast-paced technological disruptions and complexity of financial crimes in stock markets have put immense pressure on market regulators. As economies and equity markets evolve, good research investigations can aid in a better understanding of market manipulation and regulatory compliance. The proposed research directions will be very useful to researchers in this field as well as generate key inputs for stock market regulators to deal with market misbehavior.

This study has adopted a period-wise broad-based scientific approach to identify some of the most pertinent gaps in the subject and has proposed practical areas of study to strengthen the literature in the said field.

This study focuses on the management of job burnout among customer service representatives. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether supervisor support, monetary rewards, and career paths moderate the relationship between job burnout and turnover intentions.

The authors conducted a survey of 287 customer service representatives from seven call centers for the analysis. To validate the research model and test the hypotheses, the authors employed structural equation modeling, and for the moderating effects, the authors conducted a multi‐group analysis after dividing the moderating variables into high and low groups by using each of their means as a split point.

As expected, the results indicate that emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment increased turnover intentions. Emotional exhaustion led to a sharp increase in depersonalization. The results for the three moderating variables indicate that not all interventions were always useful for all three components of job burnout. In particular, the application of supervisor support required considerable attention because it exacerbated the adverse effect of depersonalization on turnover intentions. Monetary rewards reduced turnover intentions under depersonalization, whereas they increased turnover intentions under reduced personal accomplishment. Career paths reduced turnover intentions under both depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment.

This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the moderating effects of supervisor support, monetary rewards, and career paths on the relationships between three components of job burnout and turnover intentions for customer service representatives from call centers.

Industries start focusing on the green concept in supply chain management (SCM) to reduce waste and emission, preserve the quality of natural resources and decrease the consumption of hazardous/harmful materials for better product life cycle, which not only improve environmental performance but also economic performance. But, for industries, it is still very difficult to understand and analyze the effect of individual activities and their corresponding contribution. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze selected issues in green supply chain management for the implementation of the green concept in industries.

To fulfill the objectives of this paper, analytical network process-multi-objective optimization using rational analysis (ANP-MOORA) techniques are used. In the proposed methodologies, different issues, sub-issues, and alternatives are identified for the selection of the best supply chain using ANP which is being followed by the MOORA method.

Findings of this paper are highly valuable for the Indian manufacturing industries for the management of green supply chain (GSC) issues.

In this research, only selected issues are identified and analyzed for the management of GSCs. Further, it is believed that an ANP-based framework helps to take up the explicit account of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches in decision making and for improving and selecting the best supply chain. Other issues in GSC can be analyzed and further extended by other MCDM approaches.

This paper identified different type of supply chains and their issues. The systematic way of analyzing the green concept in supply chain helps the researchers and managers to implement green management practices for improving economic and environmental performance.

The study was designed to understand important aspects of the call centre agents' job, from their point of view, and the relationships between these aspects and agent effectiveness as perceived by agents' supervisors.

Qualitative data gathering (from 113 agents) involved three methods: critical incidents, behavioural events interviews and focus group interviews. Based on the items thus identified, a questionnaire was administered (n=169) to agents in two call centres, and the results were analysed using factor analysis and correlation analysis.

Four distinct factors emerged from the analysis: intrinsic motivation (IM, α=0.91), reward/recognition (RR, α=0.56), customer stress (CS, α=0.85) and stress management (SM, α=0.74). IM correlated positively with effectiveness, especially among experienced agents. CS correlated negatively with IM and positively with RR; SM correlated positively with IM.

Some limitations are: self‐reported data, representing one point in time, and with only two call centres. IM and CS present opportunities for further in‐depth study, among frontline employees in general.

The study has many significant practical implications for call centre managers to improve agents' performance by tapping into IM rather than control. Further, higher levels of IM are likely to lead to a less stressed workforce.

Our study has indicated two new and important constructs (IM and CS) that emerged from agents, and established important links between these constructs, and with effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to predict a suitable paper substrate which has high capillary pressure with the tendency of subsequent fluid wrenching in onward direction for the fabrication of microfluidics device application.

The experiment has been done on the Whatman^TM grade 1, Whatman^TM chromatography and nitrocellulose paper samples which are made by GE Healthcare Life Sciences. The structural characterization of paper samples for surface properties has been done by scanning electron microscope and ImageJ software. Identification of functional groups on the surface of samples has been done by Fourier transform infrared analysis. A finite elemental analysis has also been performed by using the “Multiphase Flow in Porous Media” module of the COMSOL Multiphysics tool which combines Darcy’s law and Phase Transport in Porous Media interface.

Experimentally, it has been concluded that the paper substrate for flexible microfluidic device application must have large number of internal (intra- and interfiber) pores with fewer void spaces (external pores) that have high capillary pressure to propel the fluid in onward direction with narrow paper fiber channel.

Surface structure has a dynamic impact in paper substrate utilization in multiple applications such as paper manufacturing, printing process and microfluidics applications.