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The present chapter attempts to highlight the vulnerabilities of female migrants as compared to non-migrants in the unorganized urban labor market. Informal female migrants working in construction, as domestic workers, tailors/boutiques, and garment workers in the urban unorganized sector of Uttar Pradesh’s selected urban locations, are covered in this chapter. Though the fact prevails that workers in the unorganized labor markets are confronted with various livelihood crunches, still those who are migrants and swelling the urban labor markets are more prone to different vulnerabilities. There is scanty literature on the situation and condition of migrants particularly female migrant workers in India, whereas we know more about the condition of international migrants, mainly migrant workers in the Gulf and other regions. The study is based on interviews with 174 female informal workers who have migrated and 222 non-migrants from various regions of the state to the urban locations of selected cities. Our study also attempts to do an in-depth, qualitative exploration of these vulnerable women’s lives and perceptions and tries to capture layered vulnerabilities, risks, and rewards confronted due to both migration and work in the informal sector. Specifically, the findings reflect upon the fact that how strong societal norms may actually prevent women from acknowledging or articulating the true reasons for their migrations.

The purpose of this study is to comprehensively analyse and compare equity crowdfunding (ECF) regulations across 26 countries, shedding light on the diverse regulatory frameworks, investor and issuer limits and the evolution of ECF globally. By addressing this research gap and providing consolidated insights, the study aims to inform policymakers, researchers and entrepreneurs about the regulatory landscape of ECF, fostering a deeper understanding of its potential and challenges in various economies. Ultimately, the study contributes to the advancement of ECF as an alternative financing method for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and startups, empowering them to access much-needed capital for growth.

The study used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) model for a systematic literature review on global ECF regulations. Starting with 74 initial articles from Web of Sciences and Scopus databases, duplicates were removed and language criteria applied, leaving 42 articles. After a thorough full-text screening, 20 articles were excluded, resulting in the review of 22 papers from 2016 to 2022. PRISMA’s structured framework enhances the quality of systematic reviews, ensuring transparency and accessibility of findings for various stakeholders, including researchers, practitioners and policymakers, in the field of ECF regulations.

This study examines ECF regulations across various countries. Notably, the UK has advanced regulations, while the USA adopted them later through the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. Canada regulates at the provincial level. Malaysia and China were early adopters in Asia, but Hong Kong, Japan, Israel and India have bans. Turkey introduced regulations in 2019. New Zealand and Australia enacted laws, with Australia referring to it as “crowd-sourced equity funding”. Italy, Austria, France, Germany and Belgium have established regulations in Europe. These regulations vary in investor and issuer limits, disclosure requirements and anti-corruption measures, impacting the growth of ECF markets.

This study’s findings underscore the diverse regulatory landscape governing ECF worldwide. It reveals that regulatory approaches vary from liberal to protectionist, reflecting each country’s unique economic and political context. The implications of this research highlight the need for cross-country analysis to inform practical implementation and the effectiveness of emerging ECF ecosystems. This knowledge can inspire regulatory adjustments, support startups and foster entrepreneurial growth in emerging economies, ultimately reshaping early-stage funding for new-age startups and SMEs on a global scale.

This study’s originality lies in its comprehensive analysis of ECF regulations across 26 diverse countries, shedding light on the intricate interplay between regulatory frameworks and a nation’s political-economic landscape. By delving into the nuanced variations in investor limits, investment types and regulatory strategies, it unveils the multifaceted nature of ECF regulation globally. Furthermore, this research adds value by comparing divergent perspectives on investment constraints and offering an understanding of their impact on ECF efficacy. Ultimately, the study’s unique contribution lies in its potential to inform practical implementation, shape legislative frameworks and catalyse entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging economies, propelling the evolution of early-stage funding practices.

This study intends to explore the influence of emotional intelligence on employee self-efficacy in Pakistan's telecom industry. Besides, it explores the mediating effect of emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting) between them. This study also tests the relationship between emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting) and self-efficacy in the customer care of Pakistan's telecom division.

The study leads forward with a positivist approach to obtain data in two different waves as a time lag study from the big five telecom companies operating in Pakistan. The data was collected from 270 employees working in Customer Services in the Telecom sector.

The results reveal that there exists a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy in customer care employees in Pakistan's telecommunication division sector. Moreover, emotional labor (deep acting) partially mediates the relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy, and surface acting could not mediate the relationship among the employees of customer care in Pakistan's telecom division.

Management of emotions at the workplace has been an immensely vital area in managing the performance of employees, especially in customer-centric jobs, where dealing with customers is the prime focus and achieving customer satisfaction is the utmost outcome. There is limited evidence of the relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy specifically in the customer care of the Telecom sector.

In modern societies, consumer well-being is dependent on choices regarding complex services, such as investments, health care, insurance and lending. However, evaluating costs of such services is often difficult for consumers due to a combination of limited cognitive resources and complexity of the service. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine to what extent three specific consequences of complexity influence consumer tendencies to make mistakes when evaluating the costs (or price) of complex services.

Three studies were conducted (survey: n = 153, experiment: n = 332 and conjoint analysis: n = 225), all focusing on how consumers evaluate costs in the complex mutual fund setting.

The authors find that consumers struggle with estimating and using cost information in decision-making in the complex services setting. Consumers of complex services frequently underestimate the costs over the long-term, may see costs as a signal of service quality and are susceptible to influence from presentation formats when evaluating costs.

The study investigates mutual funds, which is one example of a complex service. In order to get a full picture of how consumers deal with costs in complex setting, future research needs to expand this focus to other types of complex services.

The results have implications for both marketers of complex services and policymakers. For marketers, this paper highlights that competing with a low-cost strategy may be difficult in the complex services setting as consumers may lack the ability to actually evaluate what they pay over the long term. For policymakers, increased simplification of prices may be an attractive option. However, it is important that this simplification is done in a way that increases the possibility to compare prices.

As complexity influences several aspects of decision-making, an understanding of how consumers evaluate costs in complex settings is dependent on taking a multidimensional research approach. This paper makes a novel contribution to the literature on pricing by showing that consumers struggle with multiple aspects when evaluating costs in complex contexts. Understanding these effects is important to policy, as well as to research on the cognitive value of simplicity that is currently gaining traction in marketing research.

Circularity has acted as an essential phenomenon for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies, pressuring entrepreneurs to its adoption in their businesses. During the adoption and implementation of circularity, entrepreneurs or circular entrepreneurs (to be precise) are facing various challenges to its effective functioning. However, the scholarly literature has offered limited research into this phenomenon. Thus, the purpose of this research is to identify the various barriers and sub-barriers for circular entrepreneurs to adopt circularity in SMEs of emerging economies.

A combined qualitative and quantitative approach was employed to achieve the objectives of the study. In the first stage, through an extensive literature review, a list of barriers was identified and in the second stage, a deductive approach was employed to finalize the barriers. Finally, Best-Worst Method (BWM), a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, was used to analyse the significant importance of the barriers.

The findings of the study suggested the “financial barrier” as the first-ranked barrier in the adoption of Circular Business Models (CBMs), followed by the “regulatory and operational barrier” as the top second and third barriers. In terms of sub-barriers, “lack of access to funding and capital” has been identified as the top sub-barrier in the adoption of CBM, followed by “excessive regulations and red tape” and “challenges due to ambiguity of the concept”.

To transition from a circular to a linear business approach considerably quicker and smoother, entrepreneurs may utilize the findings of this study as a blueprint for the steps to overcome the barriers in a linear to a circular transition.

This research differentiates from other studies due to solicited input directly from the people who are most familiar with the challenges of making the transition from linear to CBM, i.e. the entrepreneurs themselves.

The purpose of this systematic literature review is to catalog, explore and disseminate knowledge developed related to the affordances, constraints and collaborative practices of e-mentoring in order to offer recommendations for mentoring programs.

After identifying studies utilizing inclusion and exclusion criteria and a variety of relevant databases, chosen studies were organized into three categories based on e-mentoring practices.

Results reflect chat-room-based e-mentoring and e-mentoring with a video component both to have various affordances and collaborative features. These forms of e-mentoring can potentially be relevant to new teachers’ needs, may promote community and are disconnected from mentees’ school systems. A third form of e-mentoring, virtual reality e-mentoring, however, has the potential for accessibility issues and lack of relevancy to the mentoring process.

Chat-room-based e-mentoring and e-mentoring with a video component may benefit new teachers who do not have access to in-person mentors. However, these forms of e-mentoring may necessitate a component that ensures mentors and mentees alike remain consistently engaged in the e-mentoring process.

Expectations regarding the participation of management accountants (MAs) in the promotion of sustainability of multinational enterprises (MNEs) have been poorly realised. This raises the question of whether MAs are invited to join in sustainability promotion or does sustainability not fit the perceived professional role of MAs. We suggest that the development of individual-level engagement of corporate sustainability is required for MAs to start contributing to corporate sustainability.

We utilise the psychological ownership theory to investigate how MAs’ professional role could develop to incorporate advancing sustainability. Our qualitative study is based on 32 interviews conducted in seven local business units of three different technology-oriented MNEs.

We reveal features connected to the professional role of MAs that may impede the activation of the routes to psychological ownership of corporate sustainability, thus undermining their involvement in corporate sustainability enhancement. Moreover, we show that MAs’ own perceptions of their professional role may impede the stimulation of the routes.

From a managerial viewpoint, our study helps readers to understand how the routes to psychological ownership of corporate sustainability could be cultivated in the development of the future role of MAs. It also gives input for MA professional organisations and MA professional education providers to develop conditions that foster sustainability thinking among MAs. Moreover, by integrating the examination of MAs’ professional role with the psychological ownership theory, we broaden the theoretical scene both in management accounting and in business sustainability research.

Due to government policies, accreditation demands, competition, digital India reforms and National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the need for electronic human resource management (e-HRM) has increased considerably in the Indian higher education (HE) sector, but the literature has revealed that the adoption of e-HRM practices in Indian HE institutions (HEIs) is still in its embryonic stage; therefore, the purpose of the current qualitative study is to explore the challenges and facilitators of e-HRM adoption in the Indian HE sector through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

The present study incorporates IPA, to capture the personal lived experiences of the HR executives employed in the Indian HEIs. Using purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the HR executives employed in Indian universities and institutions to know the perspectives on the adoption of e-HRM practices in Indian HEIs.

The study identified two superordinate themes, namely, challenges and facilitators of e-HRM adoption in the Indian HE sector. The superordinate theme “challenges” comprises eight sub-themes. Further, the theme “facilitators” consists of six subthemes.

The study has implications for the stakeholders of the HE sector, i.e. HR practitioners, top executives of the HE sector, government and HE regulators and other stakeholders of the HE sector.

This study has given deep insights into the challenges and facilitators in the adoption of e-HRM practices in the Indian HE sector, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study till date has filled this knowledge gap through qualitative exploration using IPA.

The study explores the impact of food influencers on consumer behaviour in the social media context. It assesses the interplay between the number of followers an influencer has and the type of content this influencer communicates to the audience. Doing so, the research contributes to the strategic refinement of influencer marketing practices, especially in the food industry.

The study employed an experimental between-subject design 2 (influencer type: micro vs macro) x 2 (content type: informational vs entertaining). It recruited 197 Prolific participants (45.7% female, Mage = 45.076), testing their perceptions towards the influencer and the endorsed product in the social media post.

There was a significant interaction between influencer type and content type on consumers’ attitudes towards and their willingness to buy the advertised product. Specifically, the notion that “the more followers, the better” may only be applicable when consumers peruse the content for entertainment purposes, whereas while they read it for information purposes, a micro influencer (with hundreds to thousands of followers) may have as much impact on consumer behaviour as a macro influencer (with hundreds of thousands to a million followers).

Our findings offer a nuanced understanding into the conventional wisdom that people often follow crowd behaviour. Using the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM), we explicate when the number of followers matters and when the content type prevails.