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Explore perceptions of the importance of information literacy among different stakeholders, and gain a better understanding of its role in the accounting curriculum.

Literature review, stakeholder surveys, and written feedback.

The perceptions of academics, employers, and alumni uniformly highlighted the importance of information literacy for continuous learning in an evolving environment. The feedback included open-ended questions where the alumni emphasized the importance of the area over the different stages of their careers. While there may be differences in perspectives of academics and employers/alumni on information literacy, with the latter more likely to hold a pragmatic perspective related to career advancement, the overall consensus highlights the need for a systematic approach to the area. Student feedback suggested that the learning process occurred over stages in the college curriculum. Overall, the results of this exploratory study indicate the value of planning the course curriculum systematically to enable students to develop information literacy skills incrementally and in relation to their specific areas of specialization.

Highlights the value of information literacy in deeper and lifelong learning.

Students are better equipped for continuous learning to meet the challenges of changing environment.

Although information literacy is an important pedagogic area, accounting academic research does not appear to have addressed its implications for student learning.

Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) are community health workers under the National Rural Health Mission of Government of India (NRHM). They have played a pivotal role during the COVID-19 pandemic in providing information and healthcare services to and from the remotest part of a village in India, working round the clock tracing patients and providing other COVID-19 related services along with fulfilling their basic duties of anti-natal care, immunization, sanitization, etc. The chapter seeks to understand the causative factors of invisibility and marginalization of ASHA workers. As most of them come from low-income and low-literacy background, they face discrimination and marginalization with long working hours, very low wages, and being treated as social pariah by the community they work in and work for. The study is particularly relevant because ASHA workers have worked as a communicating link between doctors, hospitals, and communities, and also through door-to-door survey, they have collected massive data during the pandemic, which has helped the governments to frame policies and take decisions. Both qualitative and quantitative methods have been used. I have interviewed some 55 ASHA workers (some of being my former students). I have used news clippings and government reports, regulations, directives and guidelines, survey reports of Thomas Reuters foundation, Amnesty International, Aziz Premji Foundation, as source material for information. There are certain gaps in policy making, social behavior, and attitude toward the ASHA workers, which need to be addressed.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a generalized framework that illustrates the potential for the resources, events and agents (REA) model to integrate business strategy and information systems planning. The essential point of connection, the business process, enables the REA to form a complementary platform to integrate strategic change information to support change strategies.

The paper uses a case study to illustrate application of the framework.

The framework illustrates how the expanding ontology and semantic granularity and scalability features of the REA enterprise domain ontology, support mapping a range of change strategies structured using Venkataraman's change framework.

This paper is exploratory in nature. The method uses existing case information, but the nature of the work does not lend itself to the traditional descriptive approach.

Integration of business strategy and information systems planning is critical for organizational success. Poor integration between change initiatives and systems poses a challenge in implementing change strategies. Conceptual models that support change initiatives provide users an effective medium to use domain knowledge to support change strategies.

The paper integrates existing concepts in the REA model (with some modification to the process view of the REA to adapt to multiple change initiatives). To the authors’ knowledge, there are no other papers that have offered a generalized framework for conceptualizing change initiatives of different levels.

The purpose of this paper is to provide systematic empirical evidence on the health planning through Village Health Sanitation and Nutrition Committees (VHSNCs) in India.

A micro-level study was carried out using qualitative study design. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 105 respondents selected from 42 VHSNC sites. A thematic analytical framework approach was used to analyse the data.

The research results indicate that VHSNCs are playing a significant role in health planning. However, the committee meetings are not organised by the committee members on the regular basis. Most of the VHSNC members do not make village health plans. There are some challenges associated with the functioning of VHSNCs like insufficient resources, lack of people’s interest, insignificant attention and the unfair behaviour of the Panchayati Raj leaders.

The implications of the findings suggest that VHSNCs play a significant role in health planning. However, the leadership is ineffective due to their partial capabilities and approach that generate non-conducive environment. Studies of such nature will be helpful for policy makers in understanding the current situation and micro-level picture of VHSNC and also in analysing it in the existing health system.

VHSNC functions with a broader concern and cover range of social determinants at the village level. This study provides empirical evidence on the VHSNCs as lowest part of the health system.

This paper aims to explore the challenges and benefits arising from the involvement of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) in the provisioning of primary healthcare in a decentralised health system of India.

A qualitative study design was used in this study. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews from 89 respondents selected from nine primary health centres across the district. A thematic analytical framework approach was used to analyse the data.

The research results indicate that there are several challenges resulting from PRIs involvement, including prioritisation of service providers and users, coercive unethical work and lack of communication. However, there are some benefits associated with the involvement of the PRIs in service provisioning, including improved availability and regularity of healthcare providers at the health centres.

The implications of the findings suggest that the PRIs play an important role in healthcare provisioning; however, their involvement is ineffective due to their partial capabilities and approach, which creates a non-conducive environment.

Health issues are among the most important human concerns, and recognising and addressing the grassroot challenges help to locate, and overcome the challenges that hinder the smooth healthcare provisioning process.

National Rural Health Mission has recognised the PRIs as a platform to promote decentralised health planning and for achieving its goals in India. The PRIs are significantly involved in planning, monitoring and provisioning of primary healthcare services at grassroot level. This paper addresses the challenges and benefits that emerged due to their involvement.

Purpose: The study aims to explore the wider acceptance of blockchain technology and growing faith in this technology among all business domains to mitigate the chances of fraud in various sectors.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The authors focus on studies conducted during 2015–2022 using keywords such as blockchain, fraud detection and financial domain for Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The SLR approach entails two databases, namely, Scopus and IEEE Xplore, to seek relevant articles covering the effectiveness of blockchain technology in controlling financial fraud.

Findings: The findings of the research explored different types of business domains using blockchains in detecting fraud. They examined their effectiveness in other sectors such as insurance, banks, online transactions, real estate, credit card usage, etc.

Practical Implications: The results of this research highlight (1) the real-life applications of blockchain technology to secure the gateway for online transactions; (2) people from diverse backgrounds with different business objectives can strongly rely on blockchains to prevent fraud.

Originality/Value: The SLR conducted in this study assists in the identification of future avenues with practical implications, making researchers aware of the work so far carried out for checking the effectiveness of blockchain; however, it does not ignore the possibility of zero to less effectiveness in some businesses which is yet to be explored.

The primary objective of the present study is to explore the relationship between workplace spirituality and work stress among offshore and onshore employees of the Indian oil and gas industry. The present study also tends to study the difference in the stress level of offshore and onshore employees of the Oil and Gas Industry.

The size of the sample for the present study was 202 respondents. It includes 128 onshore employees and 74 offshore employees of oil and gas companies. Respondents were mainly managers and supervisors working in various departments of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Cairn India, Reliance India Ltd (RIL), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Indian Oil and Gas Ltd (IOCL). Since the different level of stress is experienced by employees at different stages of the organizational structure, thus study selected population comprising of managers and supervisors since they are believed to face similar work stressors. A variety of statistical tools like mean, t-test, correlation and multi-regression is used for the analysis of collected data.

Results show that all six dimensions of workplace spirituality are significantly negatively correlated with stress for onshore employees. However, the sense of community and gratitude are found insignificantly associated with stress for offshore employees. Stressful offshore conditions and excessive specialization might not allow offshore employees to cherish the community at the workplace and also the virtue of gratefulness. The offshore employees might have a certain level of gratitude and community system, but it is not sufficient for the employees to perceive a lower level of work relates to stress. The result gives the impression that the normal working conditions (onshore workplace) provide adequate opportunity to workplace spirituality to transcend its impact on work stress.

This is one of the pioneer studies that examined the role of workplace spirituality and stress in stress management of offshore and onshore employees of Indian Oil and gas companies.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework to achieve sustainable development and fulfilling these Goals will take an unprecedented effort by all sectors in society. Many universities and businesses are using the Goals within their strategies and sustainability reporting. However, this is difficult as there is currently no standard methodology to map the 17 goals, 169 targets and 232 indicators. Work at the University of Leicester has focused on developing a robust methodology to map a higher education institution's (HEI's) research contribution to the Goals. We have integrated this unique methodology into an automated software tool to measure a university's academic contribution to the Goals using mathematical text mining techniques. Our ability to quickly and effectively map institutions' research contributions has boosted our ambitions and efforts to develop software to map the full operations of an HEI or business.