Management and Labour Studies

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare and his tragedies would have heard about the ‘tragic flaw’ of his heroes. All his tragic heroes—Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Othello—catapulted towards their tragic end because of a tragic flaw: vaulting ambition in Macbeth, misplaced trust in King Lear, indecisiveness in Hamlet and green-eyed jealousy in Othello…. This article is an attempt to respond to the question of whether industrial relations practice is also characterized by a tragic flaw which significantly undermines its potency. The data for the article comes from published newspaper reports related to industrial relations incidents some of which involved avoidable workplace violence and tragic fatalities. The article analyses these industrial relations incidents in relation to previous studies and draws insights related to the root causes constituting a tragic flaw conceptualized as the ‘morphology of volatility’.

The present study is an endeavour to broaden the research on the use of social media websites in political campaigns beyond the ambit of developed countries. This article focuses on scrutinizing the role of YouTube during 2014 Indian Parliamentary elections—the first ‘social media’-based elections in India. The methodology of data collection incorporates the content analysis of 147 YouTube-based audio–visual political advertisements, associating the message characteristics (natures, types and appeals) with message reach (number of views) and viewer engagement (types of comments). The results reveal the failure of the viewers to recognize the association between message reach and viewers’ engagement with message characteristics, confirming the ‘marginal’ use of YouTube. However, the study recommends the incorporation of contemporary, Internet-based social media advertising tools along with the traditional tools in the future political marketing campaigns. This article is instrumental for political marketers and consultants in devising political marketing strategies.

The study attempts to assess the relevance of accounting theories by adopting a cross-sectional research design through survey from randomly chosen graduate and post-graduate commerce students of Tripura, a north-eastern Indian state. Based on the literature research, hypotheses and a model are formed; the reliability and validity of the instrument is checked before the final survey. The inferential statistics indicate likely to conclude that pedagogy impacts perception on accounting theories which in turn influence practices, accounting standards, financial statements, and accounting researches. It acknowledges few limitations; practice implications and policy importance are indicated and draw a roadmap for further studies.

Organizational justice has come a long way in the last six decades. Through the 1950s until the 2000s, it diverged from being a single-dimensional construct (distributive justice) to a four-dimensional construct (distributive, procedural, interpersonal and informational justice). However, by the mid-1980s, it again started moving towards convergence in the form of integrative and overall justice. This article provides a comprehensive timeline review of major historical milestones in this interesting journey of justice. It chronicles the relevant theories, evolution of various forms of justice, debates, discussions and disagreements related to the construct and the various measurement approaches used to operationalize it at different points of time. It ends by discussing the questions raised by researchers on the validity of the construct in the present era and what new paths lay ahead in the journey of justice.

The present research article is an attempt to add something new and revalidate the influence of already existing corporate governance dimensions related to the board of directors on listing-day performance of the Indian initial public offering (IPO) firms measured through underpricing. Like other emerging market economies, firms in the Indian economy are also characterized by concentrated ownership held by an owner or a promoter in the context of the Indian corporate environment. In the backdrop of this concentrated complex ownership structure, the present study analyses the influence of the board of directors on underpricing when the appointment of such directors is largely an affair handled by such owners, whom they are given the task to monitor. The sample consists of 471 IPO firms which went public during the time period from January 2003 to December 2017. Results obtained from the regression analysis show that the board size and board committees act as information signals for Indian IPO firms having a significant and negative relation with listing-day initial excess returns. Other board-related dimensions of governance do not have significant influence on underpricing. Overall board variables have a very miniscule contribution in explaining the underpricing in Indian IPO firms.