Abstract
We are happy to bring into your preview the 11.2 issue of APJMRI which covers some of the most recent researches in various fields of management. This time, we have decided to include only eight articles which were selected based on their quality, innovativeness and relevance to management research. In addition, two book reviews were also inducted in this issue to make it more comprehensive. Let me present here a brief snapshot of the papers.
The first paper by Sharath Sasidharan talks about sufficiency of the work environment in providing knowledge support and it examines the dialectics of change management techniques such as training and user involvement in system design with user task structure in impacting implementation success. His findings indicate that training and user involvement in system design had a nuanced impact on implementation success. The results point to the need for restructuring change management programs to suit the implementation environment, crafting ‘designer’ social networks that facilitate knowledge acquisition, and the inclusion of domain expertise of knowledge sources while assessing knowledge centralities.
The next article by Puja Khatri and Pragya Gupta seeks to analyze the perceptions of prevalent HR practices such as hiring and selection, career management, learning and development, performance evaluation, management policies, grievance handling, etc. and its relationship with the commitment level of the retail sector employees in Delhi-NCR. Their findings display a highly significant and positive relationship between organization commitment and perceptions of staffing & resource management practices.
The third paper by B. Charumathi and Latha Ramesh explores the factors that determine the voluntary disclosure choices of the non-financial companies listed in National Stock Exchange. The study uses a Voluntary Disclosure Index (VDI) constructed by authors. With the VDI, they measured the voluntary disclosure levels for four financial years from 2009–10 to 2012–13 using the content analysis methodology. The study uses a panel data model to analyse the effects of firm characteristics, profitability and governance and found fixed effect model to be more suitable and leverage, size and institutional ownership emerged as the determinants of voluntary disclosures. The paper is one of the first studies to use longitudinal data and a disclosure index specific to Indian context.
Next paper by S. Subramanian analyzes the relationship between corporate governance practices of listed state owned enterprises in India with institutional ownership. The paper first analyses relationship of corporate governance scores with the firm performance measured through profitability parameter. The results indicate that corporate governance and firm performance share a positive relationship, which is in line with the expectations. However the relationship between corporate governance practices and institutional ownership is negative, indicating that increasing institutional ownership is negatively affecting the corporate governance practices of the state owned firms. This result calls for further research in the area as it deviates from the results of the studies done in the context of family owned firms.
Shailesh Rastogi in his article examines the factors important for selling mutual funds through banks and how they are associated with one another. A structural model is developed to provide mutual funds industry a direction to their distribution issues using banks as an important selling point. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses have been used to find out the results. Things are changing at a very fast pace in mutual fund industry. If mutual fund industry does not take its due shape and corrective action, some other modes of investments will supersede it.
The next paper by Abolaji Joachim Abiodun, Kenneth Sola Adeyemi, Omotayo Oyeniyi and Abimbola Olabisi Olayiwola
India is a developing country and is amongst the world’s most efficient financial markets in terms of technology, regulation and systems. The market provides one of the highest savings rate in the world. While the saving rate in India is good but where these savings are invested is a cause of concern. The seventh article, written by Mandeep Kaur, Tina Vohra and Aditi Arora is an attempt to examine the level of financial literacy of university students and to find out the impact of various demographic variables on the financial literacy of these students. The study concluded that financial literacy level of the university students with Commerce and Management background is fairly good at market decision and has nothing to do with their demographic profile. In fact, ‘catch them young’ strategy curriculum is helpful in addressing the issue of financial literacy among students. Therefore, introducing financial and economic concepts in the courses (interdisciplinary courses) is needed in order to enable the students of various disciplines to deal in financial products and services.
The last but certainly not the least paper by Fu Lai Tony Yu and Diana S. Kwan explains the roles of advertising and promotion strategies from a subjectivist lens. In particular, they attempt to use phenomenological approach to explain the persuasive power of advertising. In other words, the content of advertising has to make sense to consumers. Sense making implies subjective understanding. When consumers find the advertising content to make sense, then consumers and the advertising agent (on behalf of the product) share ‘common sense’, or share the same definition of situation, which can be made possible only through inter-subjective communication. The phenomenological approach to explain the persuasive power of advertising is applied to understand the successful advertising campaign made by Vitasoy, a well-known soybean drink in Hong Kong.
We would like to thank all the authors for their valuable research contributions in various fields of management that make our APJMRI one of the leading journals representing most innovative and trending research. We sincerely hope that the readers and subscribers will find the current issue informative and interesting. Please do contact us with your feedback and our editorial team would be glad to consider it. Looking forward to your reply!