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This chapter looks at the experiments of the Aam Aadmi Party led government’s initiatives in building teacher quality for its government schools in the capital city. Outlining the contours of neoliberal influence on Indian education policy and its consequences on teacher quality, the chapter explores the political rationality that governs the case of Delhi. It does this by understanding the changing subjectivities of the school teachers within the educational reforms. The government schools in Delhi have been blamed for worsening school performance especially in student learning outcomes through basic educational tests conducted by various assessment and evaluation surveys. Among other reasons, poor teacher quality has been identified as one of the major causes of this poor performance of government school children. Therefore, gaps were identified in the teacher support system and efforts were made to revamp the system. The chapter brings out in detail how the state’s initiatives in educational reforms have produced paradoxical situations and unintended effects in practice as the state has retained a controlling role even though the reform strategies show a shift toward increasing autonomy and deregulation.

Do public opinion and political sentiments expressed on Twitter during election campaign have a meaning and message? Are they inferential, that is, can they be used to estimate the political mood prevailing among the masses? Can they also be used to reliably predict the election outcome? To answer these in the Indian context, the 2014 general election was chosen.

Tweets posted on the leading parties during the voting and crucial campaign periods were mined and manual sentiment analysis was performed on them.

A strong and positive correlation was observed between the political sentiments expressed on Twitter and election results. Further, the Time Periods during which the tweets were mined were found to have a moderating effect on this relationship.

This study showed that the month preceding the voting period was the best to predict the vote share with Twitter data – with 83.9% accuracy.

Twitter has become an important public communication tool in India, and as the study results reinstate, it is an ideal research tool to gauge public opinion.

The purpose of this study is to capture the strength of consumer’s perceived brand sacredness. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of three related dimensions: supremacy, mesmerization and communitas.

Six empirical studies were conducted to identify the brand sacredness construct domains, develop and validate the measurement and test the nomological network between brand sacredness and it antecedent and outcome variables.

Results from a series of studies provided robust supports for the scale structure and demarcated the construct domains from other consumer–brand relationship measures. Testing of nomological validity of the scale further showed that brand sacredness is influenced by brand love, emotional brand attachment and brand loyalty and, meanwhile, provides explanatory power to predict theoretically related outcome variables, including transcendent consumer experience, defense of brand, incorporation brand in extended-self, brand ritualism and brand evangelism.

This study is based on cross-sectional survey data obtained from respondents belonging to well-established brand communities. A longitudinal study involving recent and emerging brand communities could provide an enhanced understanding of the evolution of brand sacredness with time, including brand sacralizaton process as well as possible de-sacralization process.

The study provides significant insights for brand managers to create an enduring brand and ascertain that consumers find their affiliations with the brand and make it the sacred core of their lives by fandom management through brand evangelism.

This study adds to the theory on consumer–brand relationship realm by delineating the domains of brand sacredness with its defining feature of extraordinary experience transcending an ordinary brand. It contributes to the existing body of branding and customer-based brand equity literature by incorporating the spiritual aspects of faith, passion and devotion into measuring the value of a brand.