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The purpose of this paper is to examine experiences of harassment within the context of precarious work, which in Canada is shaped by subnational legislative frameworks.

A narrative inquiry approach to data collection and analysis was adopted. The paper draws from 72 interviews conducted with workers in precarious jobs from various industries in three cities in the Canadian province of Ontario, as well as 52 employment standards officers (ESOs) from 15 local Ministry of Labour offices in every region across the province. Placing workers’ stories in counterpoint to those of ESOs brings them into conversations about the law to which they would normally be left out.

The main finding of this paper is that harassment and employment standards (ES) violations are interrelated phenomena experienced as abuses of power and as tactics of control occurring within a context that is shaped by legislative frameworks.

This paper demonstrates that for workers in precarious jobs legislative frameworks and labor market practices in Ontario do not provide adequate redress for harassment and ES violations. In so doing, legislative frameworks render invisible the power imbalances within the employment relationship and obscure the interrelatedness of harassment and the wider erosion of workplace norms.

This paper aims to focus on the communications skills training given to transnational call center workers in India whose jobs involve providing customer service to Western customers. Emotion work is a key component of customer service jobs, and this work is constructed as an important soft skill.

Between 2002 and 2009, 100 interviews were conducted with customer service workers, trainers and managers in India. Respondents provided detailed descriptions of their training curricula and some workers shared their complete set of training booklets. The analysis for this paper is based on a section of the curricula that focuses on communication skills used during training programs for Indian customer service agents.

Training curricula designed to enhance the communication skills of call center agents are vehicles through which workers learn to make sense of their place in social, economic and cross‐national hierarchies.

The study of emotion work in relation to workplace learning occurs in the context of global economic regimes.

Training curricula on communication skills serves to help workers to cope with the expression of customer abuse. Rather, there is a need to develop regulations that protect workers from customer aggression.

The aim of this Guest Editorial is to position the special issue.

The Guest Editors reflect on critical perspectives on the relationship between emotion and learning in the workplace, and also present the four papers that constitute the special issue.

Emotion and learning are deeply intertwined in the workplace. To understand this inter‐relationship, it is essential to examine the cultural and political context of particular organisations and the countries in which they are located. Class, gender and race are also highly influential factors that need to be taken into account in such studies.

The special issue gives space and consideration to under‐explored and under‐developed areas in the literature on emotion and learning in the workplace: how emotional suffering can block workplace learning, race, emotion and learning in the workplace, and emotion in relation to ICT support for learning.

The present study examines the mediating role of teleworking and the moderating role of resilience in explaining the relationship between perceived stress and psychological well-being of working mothers in India. Conservation of resource theory (COR) is taken to support the present study.

The data of 326 respondents has been collected from working mothers in various sectors of Delhi NCR region of India. Confirmatory factor analysis was used for construct validity, and SPSS Macro Process (Hayes) was used for testing the hypotheses.

The results of the study found an inverse association between perceived stress and psychological well-being. Teleworking acted as a partial mediator and resilience proved to be a significant moderator for teleworking-well-being relationship.

The study is based at Delhi NCR of India, and future studies may be based on a diverse population within the country to generalize the findings in different cultural and industrial contexts. The present work is based only on the psychological well-being of the working mothers, it can be extended to study the organizational stress for both the genders and other demographic variables.

The study extends the research on perceived stress and teleworking by empirically testing the association between perceived stress and psychological well-being in the presence of teleworking as a mediating variable. The findings suggest some practical implications for HR managers and OD Practitioners. The organizations must develop a plan to support working mothers by providing flexible working hours and arranging online stress management programs for them.

Although teleworking is studied previously, there is a scarcity of research examining the impact of teleworking on psychological well-being of working mothers in Asian context. It would help in understanding the process that how teleworking has been stressful for working mothers and also deliberate the role of resilience in the relationship between teleworking and psychological well-being due to perceived stress, as it seems a ray of hope in new normal work situations.

The purpose of this paper is to first bring to light the essential digital strategies to study organizations. Second, how businesses can improve their strategic capabilities by using the information gathered from internet sources or networks. Third, this study investigates how employees in an organization tend to engage in positive and/or negative gossip and how gossips affect coworker-rated informal influence in organization and supervisor-rated performance. Social network analysis is used to find the underlying relationships between gossips, coworker-rated influence and supervisor-rated performance.

This research paper is divided into two parts. The first study based on profound synthesis of literature. Major digital sources to study organizations are identified. The strategies requirement for each channel is identified. Suggestions are given to managers to improve strategic decision-making based on big data. The second study is a cross-sectional study where questionnaires (survey) are used to elicit data. Social network analysis is used to analyze the data using ucinet 6 software.

The findings of the study pinpoint the skills required to analyze large data, available in organizations. The second study finds out that close friends are more engaged in gossips than coworkers who have only working relationships. The friends having high structural embeddedness are more likely to be involved in negative gossips. Coworker perceives those employees who are engaged in negative gossips as having high informal influence. However, there is negative relationship between negative gossips and supervisor-rated influence.

The research study is cross-sectional in design; however, longitudinal design can be used to gain more insights about negative gossips and their effects. Second, a very small sample is used in this study.

This study can be used to understand informal communication network in the organization. Managers can use this channel to pass information quickly, as informal channels are faster than formal communication channels. This research can be used to understand the underling relationships between the coworkers in organizations

This paper provides guidelines to organizational life and information on how the informal networks within organization can be studied.

This paper analyzes how information systems (IS) can serve as tools of neo-colonial control in offshore outsourcing of research and development work. It draws on critical work examining business and knowledge process outsourcing.

The paper reports an empirical study of how laboratory information management systems (LIMS) shape offshore outsourcing practices involving Western client firms and Indian contract research organizations (CROs) in the pharmaceutical industry. The study adopted a multi-actor perspective, involving interviews with representatives of Western clients, Indian CROs, system validation auditors, and software vendors. The analysis was iterative and interpretative, guided by postcolonial sensitivity to themes of power and control.

The study found that LIMS act as tools of neo-colonial control at three levels. As Western clients specify particular brands of LIMS, they create a hierarchy among local CROs and impact the development of the local LIMS industry. At inter-organizational level, LIMS shape relationships by allowing remote, real-time and retrospective surveillance of CROs’ work. At individual level, the ability of LIMS to support micro-modularizing of research leads to routinization of scientific discovery, negatively impacting scientists’ work satisfaction.

By examining multiple actors’ perceptions of IS, this paper looks beyond the rhetoric of system efficiency characteristic of most international business research. As it explores dynamics of power and control surrounding IS, it also questions the proposition that outsourcing of high-end work will move emerging economies upstream in the value chain.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of earnings management during initial public offerings on the listing day returns.

The study collected data for 511 Indian IPOs that came between April 2003 and March 2019 for calculating earnings management. On the basis of the Cross Sectional Modified Jones Model 1995, the paper presents three proxies of earnings management as discretionary accruals (DA), discretionary current accruals (DCA) and discretionary long-term accruals (DLA). The study further used correlation and multiple regression analysis to assess the impact of earnings management on listing day returns.

The findings show that earnings management and listing day returns vary through issue-year and industry-type. Apart from it, the study reveals a greater contribution of short-term accruals in earnings management on the basis of higher DCA values. It also discloses that the aggregate level of earnings management (DA) influences listing returns, whereas DCA and DLA separately have no impact on the listing day returns of the Indian IPOs.

The findings are useful to potential investors and analysts to observe, assess and understand the quality of financial reports that are based on fallacious disclosure of accounting figures. The study also reflects the efficacy of Indian regulatory norms for IPOs in constraining earnings management and underpricing, thus providing meaningful insight to the policy makers and the regulators.

This study is distinguished by its focus on determining the influence of earnings management on listing day returns in Indian IPOs by using three earnings management proxies.

In part-I of this review series, research from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka was reviewed. The purpose of this paper which is part-II of the series, is to review management research from India and Pakistan over a 25-year period from 1990 to 2014.

A systematic review approach was adopted for this research. As a quality standard for inclusion, articles were restricted to journals rated A*, A, or B by the Australian Business Deans Council in 2013 and either Q1 or Q2 in the Scopus/Imago classification system. The divisions and interest groups of the Academy of Management were used as framework to organize the search results.

A total of 1,039 articles related to India (n = 930) and Pakistan (n = 112) emerged from the search process, with three articles being related to both countries. The research was published in 163 different journals that met the quality criteria. The period under review coincides with the advent of economic liberalization in India and this emerged as a major theme in the India-related research. Other context-specific insights for these two countries are also derived from an ecological and institutional theory perspective.

This research represents the first comprehensive and systematic review of management research in India and Pakistan. As in part-I, the unique review approach allows for strict adherence to a predetermined quality standard while including a wide variety of journals and research traditions.