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This paper aims to explore the immediate proactive corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts undertaken by select organizations in India in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the approach they have adopted toward it.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 senior managers across top Bombay Stock Exchange indexed organizations from the manufacturing and services sector in India during the national COVID-19 pandemic lockdown between March and June 2020. Manual content analysis and the Gioia method were used to arrive at the insights.

Results of the analysis showcase the spirited immediate CSR measures undertaken by the select organizations in the broader interests of the community at large. The study also highlights the need for a paradox approach toward CSR strategy.

Given that the present study adopts an exploratory qualitative research design, the scope for generalization is rather limited.

This paper classifies COVID-19 related initiatives undertaken by selected few top organizations in India and attempts to justify the need to opt for a paradox approach toward CSR strategy.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first few studies to have attempted to put forth a dialog at the intersection of COVID-19 and CSR with rich insights gained from qualitative data collected during India’s intense lockdown period and offering a different perspective with the inclusion of paradox theory into the discussion.

The rousing phenomenon of the ageing population is becoming a vital issue and demanding fulminant actions. Population ageing is a resultant of the enhanced health-care system, groovy antibiotics, medications and economic well-being. Old age leads to copious amounts of ailments. Aged people, owing to their reduced mobility and enervating disabilities, tend to rely upon caretakers and/or nursing personnel. With the increasing vogue of nuclear families in the society, the elderly are at the risk of being unveiled to emotional, physical and fiscal insecurities in the years to come. Caring for those seniors will be an enormous undertaking.

There is a dire need for an intelligent assistive system to meet out the requirements of continuous holistic care and monitoring. Assistive robots and systems used for elderly care are studied. The design motivation for the robots, elderly–robot interaction capabilities and technology incorporated in the systems are examined meticulously.

From the survey, it is suggested that the subsystems of an assistive robot revamped for better human–machine interactions will be a potential alternative to the human counterpart. Affirmable advancements in the robot design and interaction methodologies that would increase the holistic care and assistance for aged people are analyzed and listed.

This paper reviews the available assistive technologies and suggests a synergistic model that can be adopted for the caring of the elderly.

This research aims to study employees' pandemic-induced work–home boundary violations using the work–home boundary model. Boundary theory and social theories provide the theoretical underpinnings for this study. The authors study the role of gender, gender role ideology, and fear of COVID-19 in explaining the relationship between work–home boundary violations, work–family conflict (WFC), and subjective well-being (SWB) among working professionals.

Data were gathered using an online survey on married and working individuals (N = 354) and analyzed using the multi-group analysis technique in structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results show that men faced higher WFC due to job insecurity, while women reported higher WFC due to traditional gender role ideology. Surprisingly, men reported lower subjective well-being due to WFC compared to women, when fear of COVID-19 was low. One promising finding is the potential in using problem-focused coping strategy (PCS) as a boundary-work tactic for both men and women to ensure boundary control (BC) to reduce WFC and improve SWB during the new normal.

This study contributes to boundary theory, social role theory, and social support resource theory, along with practical implications for employees, organizations, and policymakers.

This study dissects the primary role of problem-focused coping as a valid coping mechanism for managing the issues arising from the pandemic-induced unfavorable working conditions.

Given the urgency in taking climate action, the purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework to drive corporate environmental responsibility (CER) through environmentally responsible decision making (ERDM) by incorporating two interventions, the accuracy of mental models (MM) of the key decision makers and green nudging.

Relevant theories in management, cognition and behavioral sciences are studied and leaned on to build this conceptual framework.

Our mind creates MM about the real world to illustrate what we think about the world and about how it works. MM are clouded with biases and misconceptions. These MM have a tremendous impact on our behavior. The authors present how increasing the accuracy of the MM of environmental phenomena leads to efficient sensemaking and directs an ERDM thereby contributing to the environmental responsibility gestures of an organization. Green nudges attack the choice architecture of the decision maker toward ERDM.

This framework contributes to the literature on corporate social responsibility. It advances the theories at the intersection of business, economy and natural environment. The framework built with assumptions opens the scope for future research and empirical testing.

This framework contributes to practice by recommending implementable and sustainable interventions. The inaccuracies found may become the base for a sector-wise training program. Due to mimetic isomorphism, driving CER may reap policy implications.

This multi-level conceptual framework is the first to propose individual level drivers of organizational level outcome CER through MM of environmental phenomena of key decision makers and green nudging. The paper offers complementary interventions.

This paper aims to investigate the level of environmental communication and the predominant themes of environmental initiatives and technologies used in India.

In this exploratory study, a manual content analysis was conducted using print and website data related to corporate environmental communication of 60 Indian companies listed in the Bombay Stock Exchange, representing the top thirty from manufacturing and information technology (IT) sector each.

The authors classified the level of importance based on seven attributes, distinguished between hard and soft disclosure and identified the prevalent environmental practices and technologies in each sector. The authors found that the environmental communication of the IT sector is technology-based than the manufacturing sector, but both are weak in acknowledging climate change.

Managers, across the two sectors, can make their organizations environmentally responsible by learning and applying the current practices/technologies and reap benefits by mimetic isomorphism or create competitive advantage.

Building on the theoretical and practical works in corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility communication literature, the authors contribute to the stakeholder theory and voluntary disclosure theory. The findings of the study provide the much-needed base for future research that links the engineering and management community to take the scholarship further to prevent the climate crisis.

This paper aims to present a concise review on the variant state-of-the-art dynamic task allocation strategies. It presents a thorough discussion about the existing dynamic task allocation strategies mainly with respect to the problem application, constraints, objective functions and uncertainty handling methods.

This paper briefs the introduction of multi-robot dynamic task allocation problem and discloses the challenges that exist in real-world dynamic task allocation problems. Numerous task allocation strategies are discussed in this paper, and it establishes the characteristics features between them in a qualitative manner. This paper also exhibits the existing research gaps and conducive future research directions in dynamic task allocation for multiple mobile robot systems.

This paper concerns the objective functions, robustness, task allocation time, completion time, and task reallocation feature for performance analysis of different task allocation strategies. It prescribes suitable real-world applications for variant task allocation strategies and identifies the challenges to be resolved in multi-robot task allocation strategies.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of dynamic task allocation strategies and incites the salient research directions to the researchers in multi-robot dynamic task allocation problems. This paper aims to summarize the latest approaches in the application of exploration problems.

Business and society have been known to be interlinked by a thread called sustainability. However, over the years, this thread has lost its strength because of the dominance of an instrumental perspective towards corporate sustainability (CS). Literature shows that there are innumerable tensions around CS decisions and propose several reasons why decision-makers predominantly resort to the instrumental perspective (CS as a mean) rather than the intrinsic perspective (CS as an end) when addressing these tensions. In this chapter, the authors offer a novel solution to overcome this issue by adapting the existing definition of moral imagination (MI) from the business ethics domain to the CS domain with the help of climate science literacy and mental models of climate phenomena. The authors posit that practicing this adapted MI can facilitate decision-makers to move from the instrumental perspective to adopt an intrinsic perspective through integrative and paradox approaches when handling tensions in CS decisions. The authors contribute to the broad field of sustainability by proposing a conceptual framework that links MI to the intrinsic perspective of CS decisions. This chapter not only offers several theoretical contributions and future research directions but also posits that the empirical verification of this framework can offer much-needed insights to managers and policy-makers to combat one of the significant threats to the survival of our planet, climate crisis.

Previous research has explored the link between sustainability disclosure and reputation but produced contradictory results. This study aims to clarify the sustainability disclosure–reputation relationship through a quantitative analysis of the correlations between these variables reported in empirical research papers. The second objective was to determine how various moderators affect the sustainability disclosure–reputation link.

The meta-analysis was based on a systematic review of the literature covering empirical research on the corporate sustainability disclosure and reputation relationship. A total of 92 articles were meta-analyzed to compile their findings on four extrinsic moderators: company size, ownership, stock listing status and activity sector.

The findings confirm that a significant positive correlation exists between corporate sustainability disclosure and reputation. The moderator analysis also revealed that companies’ different characteristics can explain researchers’ divergent results.

The results have considerable practical relevance for organizational management. First, they can motivate managers to improve and disclose their company’s social and environmental impacts to strengthen their reputation, which in turn will help accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Second, the findings can ensure organizations develop disclosure and reputation management strategies adapted for each firm’s size, ownership, stock listing status and activity sector.

The results have considerable practical relevance for organizational management. First, they can motivate managers to improve and disclose their company’s social and environmental impacts to strengthen their reputation, which in turn will help accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Second, the findings can ensure organizations develop disclosure and reputation management strategies adapted for each firm’s size, ownership, stock listing status and activity sector.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this meta-analysis is the first to clarify the link between disclosure and reputation, which makes a unique contribution to the field of social and environmental accounting. A larger sample of primary research was collected, and key extrinsic moderators were examined to explain prior studies’ contradictory findings.

This paper attempts to examine the impact of merger on the stock returns and economic value added (EVA) of acquiring firms to know if the mergers are successful corporate restructuring strategies for the firms.

In total, 108 Indian firms are studied using paired sample t-test and Wilcoxon signed rank test for comparing the EVA of acquiring firms in short, medium and long term after merger. The effect of merger announcements on stock returns is analyzed by way of event study. An event window of −20 to +20 is taken and an estimation window of 256 (-276 -20) days is used in the study.

The authors find that mergers lead to significant improvement in the EVA of acquiring firms. However, the increase in financial performance and EVA is witnessed only in long term. The authors did not find any significant impact of merger announcement on the stock returns of acquiring firms.

The study is a first of study's kind, which evaluates both short-term (using event study methodology) and long-term (using EVA) impact of value addition to an acquirer after Merger & Acquisition (M&A). The study contributes to existing literature on the signaling theory of announcement of M&As and synergy gain theory of completed M&As by providing evidence from the context of an emerging market like India.