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This paper aims to explore narratives of insecurity to understand how the casualisation of the employment relationship makes life more fragile and precarious. The authors engage in an inquiry about how multinational enterprises (MNEs) structure precariousness for workers in emerging economies. The authors attempt to understand how workers analyse their experiences of precariousness and what form their resistance takes as a result of their analysis.

The authors engage with the narratives of eight Indian workers/trade union activists working in different marginal spaces of the Indian economy to uncover a commons where we are the multitude. By commons, the authors imply shared forms of property, which stand against the concept of private property that is central to the social relations of capitalism. The authors are performing the data of workers by interspersing them in an analysis of angst and hope.

Workers understand their experiences of precariousness as emerging from a complex political economy structured by MNEs, which involves multiple fronts of marginalisation. Workers realize that they need to engage in comprehensive forms of resistance to undo the regimes of precariousness. Workers create shared universes of grief to relate to each other’s experiences of precariousness. The unfreedoms experienced by workers lead to a sharing of the social relations of commons where workers can resist by expressing solidarity with each other.

The authors contribute to practice by arguing that workers’ collectives should not accept the naturalisation of precariousness. By staging a dialogue about the injuries of precariousness, they can craft a politics of resistance that begins the process of commoning.

Workers’ politics of resistance can significantly democratise the global political economy in important ways by advancing the potential for commons.

The authors make an original contribution to the study of precariousness in the context of international business by arguing that the experience of precariousness can lead to a commons where workers resist structures of injustice.

This paper aims to show that the experience of workers on the margins of international business is akin to the funeralesque. The funeralesque is understood as the appropriation of the value generated by workers across the production networks of international business.

Drawing from the engagement with crematorium workers, the narratives of workers are articulated, describing the insecurities and injustices experienced by them. The authors draw from six-month-long qualitative engagement with seven workers in a crematorium in Ahmedabad, India.

The experience of marginal subjects provides important insights into how international business, in conjunction with states, structures inequality for marginal subjects. Precariousness, social exclusion, low wages and subjectivities of humiliation are the experiences of marginal subjects. The reproduction of marginality in globalising cities is an important element of the funeralesque through which extraction and re-distribution of value across international networks is legitimised.

In understanding international business as the funeralesque, the authors demystify the power relations constituted by it. The authors provide a metaphor for dethroning the legitimacy of international business and indicate that its modern practices are similar to the practices of value appropriation that occur in a funeral.

The authors develop the metaphor of the funeralesque to gain insights into the experiences of workers on the margins of international business. The authors are, thus, able to theorise the underbelly of globalising cities in a poetic, subversive way.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of the relative performances of Mother’s canteen across the regions of Tamil Nadu and find out the determinants of inefficiencies in the scheme.

An untargeted food security scheme called Amma (Mother's) canteen was started in Tamil Nadu, India, with an aim to provide the urban poor with hygienic and healthy food at an affordable price. Along with secondary data, interviews were conducted to understand the operational details of Mother's canteen. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to find the relative efficiency of the scheme operated by nine corporations.

Based on the daily expenditure, number of meals served and revenue, seven of nine corporations were found to be inefficient. Further, sensitivity analyses found that among six procurement variables, procurement (quantity and price) of black gram and cooking oil were determinants of inefficiency.

As an untargeted scheme, the cost of delivering service-based evaluation was used for performance evaluation. Policymakers could use centralized procurement instead of open market procurement at the corporation level and standardized ingredients' usage (quantity) to further reduce the cost of the food security scheme.

The proposed DEA model may be used by policymakers to empirically evaluate the food security scheme's delivery effectiveness across various corporations in a region. Inefficient branches are identified here with empirical support for further performance improvement changes.

There are limited number of studies evaluating untargeted schemes. This paper presents the challenges of evaluating an untargeted scheme which allows self-selection of beneficiaries. The outcome of this study will help in identifying inefficient corporations, and further, improve the performance and cost of delivering untargeted food security scheme.

Extant literature shows that employee voice has ambiguous effects on organizational outcome. Especially because employee voice challenges the status quo, it can attract retaliation and lead to silencing of the employee. Thus, rather than producing change, employee voice can lead to increase in workplace tensions. On the other hand, employee voice also has positive consequences such as building a partnership-based culture between supervisors and employees. The purpose of this article is to reconcile these contradictory findings by reinforcing voice as having a deliberative dimension which fosters a harmonious dialogue around workplace issues.

We surveyed 628 managers working in organizations across different industrial relations contexts in India. Managers working in different sectors were chosen so that we could examine the consequences of employee voice across contexts with differing trade union strengths. We adopted a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach to test the effect of employee voice on environment for innovation.

We find that trust in senior management and relationship between employees and their supervising managers mediate the relationship between employee voice and environment for innovation. The findings in the article do reconcile an important dilemma about employee voice. Earlier studies have argued that employee voice is a mechanism for engaging with the dissatisfaction that employees may have in their workplaces. Our study indicates that when deliberative elements are incorporated into employee voice it is no longer merely a means for addressing dissatisfaction but constructively contributes to positive organizational outcomes such as environment for innovation.

The effects of employee voice on environment for innovation can be understood more clearly by adopting a longitudinal research design. The findings of this article are limited by the cross-sectional frame of research design adopted. The scale that is developed for employee voice needs more validation in other international contexts.

This study provides a framework through which employee voice can be shifted from adversarial frames of reference to harmonious and partnership-based forms of engagement. This also has the potential to transform the role of trade unions inside organizations and build a more collaborative edifice between multiple stakeholders. Another implication is that when voice is seen in a deliberative fashion it can lead to improved environment for innovation.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to reconceptualization of employee voice by contending that deliberative issues are an important part of transforming the status quo. Consequently, the patterns of deliberation structure constructive partnerships between different organizational stakeholders who may be perceived as having hostile relationships with each other. This study reconciles previous findings which suggested that employee voice can have negative consequences such as retaliation by suggesting that positive consequences of employee voice are contingent on its deliberative component.

Organizational scholars are intrigued about stakeholders who propose multiple and conflicting ideas about what is good for their organization. Such contradictions are called paradoxical tensions. Although researchers have singled these out for analysis, focusing only on individual tensions prevents scrutiny of multiple paradoxical tensions that simultaneously emerge and how effectively organizations can manage them. In complex environments – especially during an organizational restructuring – multiple and interrelated tensions occur. Therefore, the objective in this paper is to investigate how organizations create multiple paradoxical tensions and how the combined effect of such tensions can constrain organizations during restructuring. The authors thus aim to help managers think reflectively and to plan interventions to deal with issues arising from restructuring through the lens of paradox theory.

The authors adopted purposive sampling for an archival research-based case study of a major restructuring of a leading IT firm in India in the decade 2009–2019. This study focused on the types of paradoxes created and the response of the organization to these during the restructure. The authors identified key events using public documents and news reports from that decade. They drew on two sources of data: mainstream media coverage and third-party documents about the company. The latter included monographs and academic publications written by critics, business historians and design and management scholars.

The findings address the gaps in the literature about how reorganizing during a restructure shapes the contradictions that lead to tensions and coexisting conflicting dualities, creating paradoxes. This study provides the reader with deeper insights into belonging, organizing, learning and performing tensions – core to paradox theory – along with their short- and long-term implications for organizational restructuring. The study demonstrates organizational responses to paradox and its practical implications for managers. The paradoxical nature of cultural–structural tensions in Indian organizations continues to be researched but, by focusing on paradox theory, the authors have opened doors for future research.

Although there is no dispute that effective management of tensions can facilitate organizational performance, contradictory demands that lead to tensions have only intensified as organizational environments become more global, dynamic and competitive. Paradox theory is thus valuable for understanding tensions between equally valid principles, inferences and insights. Although this paper is based on a case study, the framework proposed here can form the basis for theoretical generalizability within certain limitations. Because organizations face similar paradoxical situations under competing demands during restructuring and because paradoxes are becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations, the authors expect their propositions to apply in other cases of restructuring. However, the authors would like to caution that the model developed here should be tested and refined in other contexts to more fully establish its validity and generalizability.

The literature on destructive leadership has largely ignored the perspective of the subordinate, especially in terms of conflict coping mechanisms. This study aims to integrate research on destructive leadership and subordinates’ voice behaviour as a conflict coping mechanism. Drawing on the social exchange, conservation of resources and social identity theories, it argues that destructive leadership negatively affects employees’ voice behaviour and that this relationship is moderated by subordinate personality and organization climate.

The proposed model was tested on a sample of 275 professionals working in the banking and insurance sector in India using a temporal research design with data collected in two phases six months apart. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used for data analysis.

The results support the main effect relationship between destructive leadership and subordinates’ voice behaviour and the moderation of subordinates’ personality and organizational climate. Temporal analysis indicates that the nature of some relationships changed across the two time periods.

A greater understanding of destructive leader behaviour and resultant coping strategies of subordinates is likely to provide insights for managers facing such situations. The findings of this study will inform the creation of redressal and voice mechanisms in organizations.

This is among the first studies to examine the impact of negative forms of leadership on subordinates’ conflict coping mechanisms using a temporal lag design across two time periods.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on failures in online flash sales (OFS) and to explore why consumers participate in an OFS even after experiencing service failure. It also examines the role of deal proneness, attribution, and emotions.

Using a mixed method approach to gain insights into this relatively unexplored phenomenon of OFS, this research uses netnography followed by a survey study.

The findings show that deal-prone customers tend to ignore service failures during OFS and re-participate in the future. In the context of OFS, failures attributed to internal locus of attribution (LOA) also have a negative effect on re-participation compared with failures attributed to external LOA. Furthermore, there is a three-way interaction among deal proneness, LOA, and past emotions. The results show that negative past emotions further exacerbate the impact of attribution on the link between deal proneness and re-participation.

In contrast with prior research, the paper shows that consumers participate even after service failure. The proposed difference is between customers who experience different LOA and past emotions offers insights into their behavior after service failure in a new context of an online/electronic commerce event – flash sales. This paper specifically explores the role of internal LOA and finds that it has a more negative impact than external LOA on re-participation.