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The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the inequality perpetuated through social categories in accessing the social capital generated through the microfinance interventions in India as the country has pronounced economic inequality by social categories like many developing stratified societies.

The study uses survey data collected from 75 villages in rural India and tests whether the formation and maximization of social capital through self-help groups (SHGs) is dominated by social categories, e.g. high-caste groups, males and superior occupation classes. Using logistic regression framework, the study assesses the formation and maximization of social capital through multiple SHG membership.

The paper finds that the microfinance approach of empowering weaker sections is considerably limited in its success, in the sense that it provides them with the opportunity to the credit access and support through SHGs. But, the empirical model further indicates that social capital in form of these SHGs may fall prey to the dominant social categories, and thus, these institutions may potentially enhance inequality.

The paper is derived from the secondary data set, so it is unable to comment field reality qualitatively.

Microfinance policy makers will have an improved understanding of inherent social inequalities while implementing group-based programs in socially stratified societies.

Social capital, if treated as an outcome accumulated in form of groups, provides with an important framework to assess the unequal access through the microfinance interventions. Overlooking the inherent unequal access will deceive the purpose of social justice in the group-based interventions. The microfinance and other welfare policies engaged in group formation and generating the social capital need to be more sensitive to the disadvantageous sections while focusing on multiple group access by disadvantaged social groups.

This paper aims to explore trade policy measures taken in response to COVID-19 and analyses in detail their extent and nature. It assesses their compatibility with World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements: specifically, whether they were necessary and justifiable efforts to protect the security and health of populations and asks how this widespread recourse to trade barriers may impact on international business?

This paper analyses an extensive database from the International Trade Centre of trade measures taken in response to COVID-19. It differentiates by type of country, nature and coverage of measures (imports or exports, type of product…). On the basis of existing jurisprudence, this paper analyses whether restrictive measures were likely to be judged legal under WTO rules.

This paper finds that, although the majority of trade measures are probably justifiable, there were nevertheless many measures whose coverage and/or nature was such that a justification under existing WTO exceptions is, at the very least, arguable. Such widespread and intense instigation of potentially WTO incompatible measures in such a short period of time undoubtedly undermines the global trade rules on which international business has relied for decades.

There is little existing analysis of the legality of measures taken under the security exceptions and no substantial analyses of the measures taken in response to COVID-19. Furthermore, little scholarly attention has been paid to the impacts on international business of the increasing use of WTO “exceptions” to justify trade measures to protect national industries and populations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine zeroing jurisprudence under the WTO’s Anti-Dumping Agreement and to see if the jurisprudence can still be applied to situations of targeted dumping where dumping takes place in a specific region, at specific timing, or for specific consumer groups.

This paper examines the prior decisions of the WTO panels and the Appellate Body relating to the zeroing practice. It categorizes the key elements of these prior decisions where the zeroing practice has been found WTO-inconsistent. While there has been no specific dispute addressing targeted dumping per se, this paper proves that core elements of the zeroing practice have been anatomized and dissected by the panels and the Appellate Body in prior proceedings. The paper then analyzes whether these key elements still exist in the specific context of targeted dumping and thus whether application of zeroing is still prohibited in targeted dumping situations.

The existing jurisprudence on zeroing from previous WTO disputes should apply to targeted dumping situations as well. Unbridled application of zeroing in the targeted dumping situations will effectively nullify the existing zeroing jurisprudence accumulated through a decade of WTO disputes. If unchecked, this calculation methodology in the context of targeted dumping may open the back door wide open for “zeroing” negative anti-dumping margins. The paper concludes that the existing jurisprudence on zeroing stands for the proposition that zeroing in targeted dumping should also be prohibited.

This paper examines the legality of the zeroing practice in targeted dumping situations, which has been one of the most controversial issues among WTO members for the past several years. The analyses and discussions contained in this paper will provide legal guideline to evaluate zeroing in targeted dumping within the WTO framework. The outcome of the research will provide a platform for continued research and discussion in this area.

This viewpoint takes up the Covid-19 pandemic as a trigger for a research agenda around societally engaged international business (IB) research.

The paper is organized as a viewpoint. First, it provides an overview of Covid-19 research in business and management and IB in particular. Second, it introduces a societally engaged IB perspective, around poverty and human rights as well as trade.

The paper offers an annotated introduction to the paper contributions of the special issue with three clusters, “re-reading the crisis”, “crisis protectionism” and “firm strategies during the pandemic”.

The paper points to future research opportunities in terms of crisis management and societally engaged IB research.

The Covid-19 crisis poses new questions for research on international business and its related disciplines. In particular, the political, economic and societal disruption which the pandemic has caused highlights the importance of addressing broader societal issues such as climate change, poverty and inequality through a purposeful and forward-looking research agenda.

The paper and the special issue are some of the first combined research outputs on the Covid-19 pandemic in international business.

The worldwide imposition of lockdown measures to control the 2020 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has shifted most executive communications with external stakeholders online, resulting in quick responses from stakeholders. This study aims to understand how presentational styles exhibited in online communication induce immediate audience responses and empirically test the effectiveness of reactive impression management tactics.

The authors analyze presentational styles using MP3 files containing executive utterances during earnings call conferences held by S&P 100-listed firms after June 2020, the quarter after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Using timestamps, the authors link each utterance to a 1-minute interval change in the ask/bid prices of the stocks that occurs a minute after the corresponding utterance begins.

Exhibiting an informational presentation style in earnings calls leads to positive and immediate audience responses. Managers tend to increase their reliance on promotional presentation styles rather than on informational ones when quarterly earnings exceed market forecasts.

Drawing on organizational genre theory, this research identifies the discrepancy between the presentation styles that audiences positively respond to and those that managers tend to exhibit in earnings calls and provides a reactive impression management typology for immediate responses from online audiences.

Due to insufficient disclosure on open market share repurchases in the USA, at any given point in time, outside shareholders have no knowledge of whether their firm is executing open market share repurchase trades. It is hypothesized that such information disparity between outside shareholders and insiders of a repurchasing firm creates asymmetric opportunities for insiders to time their sell trades in a period when the firm is engaged in buyback trading of its own shares. Insiders have an incentive to sell when the firm is in the market supporting the price by repurchasing its shares. The purpose of this study is to examine this hypothesis (insider timing hypothesis) by investigating insiders' trading activities during the periods of corporate share buyback trading.

Multiple regression analyses are used to explore relations among trades by insiders, corporate share buyback trades, and a number of other control variables.

This study finds evidence that insiders do increase the net number of shares sold in a fiscal quarter when the firm is in the market engaged in share buyback trading.

This study suggests the possibility of insiders' opportunistic trading behavior during the periods of corporate open market share buyback trading.

The purpose of this study was to compare major corporations’ web sites both in the USA and in South Korea to identify the differences in features posted on their home pages and to examine the relationship between the features and the theoretical public relations model.

Content analysis of two countries’ 30 corporate web sites based on Grunig's public relations model.

The two countries’ corporations predominantly practised press agentry and a public information model from the perspective of a public relations theoretical model. In general, US corporations post more promotional and informative information related to products or services than South Korean corporations.

Future studies of the world wide web should be extended to public relations practitioners, who are making and maintaining the web sites.

It appears that many corporate home pages, in both countries, have not made use of the powerful tool of two‐way communication for monitoring what others are saying about the corporations, since most corporations are more likely to focus on displaying one‐way promotional features than on building relationships between organizations and their public.

Although the world wide web is a new communication medium, it appears that public relations practitioners still see media relations and image building as the most prominent responsibilities of public relations.

The Kinect sensor released by Microsoft is well-known for its effectiveness on human gesture recognition. Gesture recognition by Kinect has been proved to be an efficient command operation and provides an additional human-computer interface in addition to the traditional speech recognition. For Kinect gesture recognition in the application of gesture command operations, recognition of the active user making the gesture command to Kinect will be an extremely crucial problem. The purpose of this paper is to propose a recognition method for recognizing the person identity of an active user using combined eigenspace and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with Kinect-extracted action gesture features.

Several Kinect-derived gesture features will be explored for determining the effective pattern features in the active user recognition task. In this work, a separate Kinect-derived feature design for eigenspace recognition and GMM classification is presented for achieving the optimal performance of each individual classifier. In addition to Kinect-extracted feature designs for active user recognition, this study will further develop a combined recognition method, called combined eigenspace-GMM, which properly hybridizes the decision information of both the eigenspace and the GMM for making a more reliable user recognition result.

Active user recognition using an effective combination of eigenspace and GMM with well-developed active gesture features in Kinect-based active user recognition will have an outstanding performance on the recognition accuracy. The presented Kinect-based user recognition system using the presented approach will further have the competitive benefits of recognition on both gesture commands and providing users of gesture commands.

A hybridized scheme of eigenspace and GMM performs better than eigenspace-alone or GMM-alone on recognition accuracy of active user recognition; a separate Kinect-derived feature design for eigenspace recognition and GMM classification is presented for achieving the optimal performance of the individual classifier; combined eigenspace-GMM active user recognition belonging to model-based active user recognition design has a fine extension on increasing the recognition rate by adjusting recognition models.

The purpose of this paper to classify a set of Turkish sign language (TSL) gestures by posture labeling based finite-state automata (FSA) that utilize depth values in location-based features. Gesture classification/recognition is crucial not only in communicating visually impaired people but also for educational purposes. The paper also demonstrates the practical use of the techniques for TSL.

Gesture classification is based on the sequence of posture labels that are assigned by location-based features, which are invariant under rotation and scale. Grid-based signing space clustering scheme is proposed to guide the feature extraction step. Gestures are then recognized by FSA that process temporally ordered posture labels.

Gesture classification accuracies and posture labeling performance are compared to k-nearest neighbor to show that the technique provides a reasonable framework for recognition of TSL gestures. A challenging set of gestures is tested, however the technique is extendible, and extending the training set will increase the performance.

The outcomes can be utilized as a system for educational purposes especially for visually impaired children. Besides, a communication system would be designed based on this framework.

The posture labeling scheme, which is inspired from keyframe labeling concept of video processing, is the original part of the proposed gesture classification framework. The search space is reduced to single dimension instead of 3D signing space, which also facilitates design of recognition schemes. Grid-based clustering scheme and location-based features are also new and depth values are received from Kinect. The paper is of interest for researchers in pattern recognition and computer vision.