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In highly competitive environments, sustainability positioning is crucial for firms, as they are evaluated based on their sustainable practices. This study aims to draw on the legitimacy and information asymmetry theories to explore attributes that impact business-to-business (B2B) sustainability positioning in emerging economies, such as India, within the service industry.

This study used a mixed-methods exploratory research design to examine the attributes affecting sustainability positioning. In the first phase of the study, a qualitative research method was used to explore the attributes influencing B2B sustainability positioning. In the second phase, this study used these factors to develop a structural model.

A variety of attributes was critical in assessing the sustainability positioning of B2B firms. This study identified a number of factors that explain the attributes affecting sustainability positioning in B2B markets. Some of them included environmental consciousness and external assurance.

This study significantly contributes to the theoretical discourse on sustainable practices in B2B businesses in multiple ways. First, it provides empirical data on the relationship between firms’ environmental consciousness and sustainability positioning in the B2B context, thereby adding to and expanding the current literature on this topic. Second, this study investigates the impact of external assurance on B2B firms’ sustainability positioning and shows how it can enhance credibility, transparency and accountability. Finally, it analyzes sustainable positioning in the service sector, specifically in India, thereby contributing to the body of knowledge on this topic.

This paper aims to investigate the determinants of organic food buying behaviour in an emerging economy like India, where organic food yet has low market share in spite of its potential. Using the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) as the underlying basis, it attempts to explain the effect of attitude, subjective norms and the perceived behaviour control (PBC) on buying intention towards organic food among respondents in Delhi-National capital region, India. Additionally, it attempts to discriminate functional and constructive attitudes.

A quantitative questionnaire survey approach was used on 306 respondents and multiple linear regression was used to validate the research model.

Attitudes and PBC have a significant positive impact on the intention to purchase organic food. This paper found subjective norms to be weak and barely significant to intention. The results conclude that health motives, past purchase behaviour, knowledge, affordability and trust in organic certification label are the main facilitators in organic food purchase. Primarily, the respondents see buying organic food regularly as being of value and enjoyable to them. A more favourable appearance vs conventional food was negatively related to behavioural intention.

This research could aid all stakeholders in the organic food sector, particularly emerging economies like India where the organic market is still nascent. It could be an essential driver to improve customer involvement and thus aid them in the decision-making process to choose organic food over conventional food. It also attempts to establish the usability of TPB in assessing functional attitudes based on constructive attitudes for organic food purchase.

The paper aims to investigate existing research in factors impacting organic food purchase with special reference to eco-labels and identify the relative influence of various determinants.

A conceptual framework is proposed of organic food buying behaviour after analysing a sample of 154,072 consumers reported in 91 research studies from 2001–2020. The factors are categorised into four categories on the basis of relatedness. In addition, the factors were analysed based on time, region and national economic status.

The impact of consumer psychographics, socio-demographic and product-related factor categories were found to be more pronounced compared to supply-related factor category. The results show that among individual factors like health concern, environment concern, knowledge and awareness, eco-labels and price followed by trust in organic food are the most important factors in organic food purchase. The findings suggest that eco-labels increase trust in organic food by reducing information asymmetry in consumers. However, there were differences in perception and factors importance between high-income economies and emerging economies.

The study is unique, as it analyses secondary research based on criteria of high-income economies and emerging economies. The conceptual framework can also be incorporated further into different cognitive models like the theory of planned behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the difference in firm performance between pollution prevention and pollution control strategies using a selected case study from the Indian leather industry.

This study followed a case study-based inductive research approach to validate the proposed preposition on field. The case-study analysis was based on qualitative and quantitative data. The authors developed a questionnaire and an interview protocol to capture the data about different industrial practices and motivation behind them. The study followed the concept of the triple bottom line approach for assessing the progress of the case firm on sustainability scale.

With the help of pollution preventive measures, such as replacement of salted skin with fresh skin and chromium salt with a phosphonium-based tanning agent, the case firm could overcome the biggest challenge of bringing down the level of total dissolved solid from 40,000 to 5,000 ppm in the raw effluent. Moreover, the firm has successfully recycled and converted tannery scraps and other waste into organic manure for internal use in its own plantations.

The findings of this study could not be generalized as these are based on a single case study.

This study presents an example of sustainable practices and their benefits to the Indian leather industry to follow.

It is essential to track the development of resource and pollution intensive industries such as textile, leather, pharmaceutical, etc., under burgeoning pressure of environmental compliance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the progress of Indian leather industry in terms of individual factors and total factor productivity.

This study applies and examines the various concepts of productivity such as labor productivity, capital productivity, material productivity and energy productivity. Further, it assesses and compares the performance of Indian leather industry in Tamil Nadu (TN), West Bengal (WB) and Uttar Pradesh (UP) based on productivity analysis, spatial variations determinants in productivity and technology closeness ratio.

The findings suggest that as per the productivity analysis, WB leather clusters have performed remarkably better in terms of partial factor productivity and technical efficiency (TE), followed by TN and UP. This can be attributed to shifting of leather cluster of WB to a state-of art leather complex with many avenues for resource conservation. Further, the findings reveal that the firm size and partial factor productivities have significant positive correlation with TE which supports technological theory of the firm.

The results of this study can be useful for the policy makers associated with the Indian leather industry especially to design interventions to support capacity building at individual firm level as well as cluster level to enhance the efficiency and productivity of overall industry.

The findings also support the resource dependence theory of firm according to which the larger size firms should reflect on resource conservation practices, for instance the concept of prevention is better than cure based upon 3R (reduce, recycle and reuse) principles.

The paper gives an explanation of the productivity in the leather industry in terms of its factor productivity and TE.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interdependence among dimensions of sustainability, i.e. economic, social and environmental performance, this study focuses on leading states of the Indian leather Industry.

This study followed exploratory research where partial least square (PLS) based structural equation modeling has been used. The states have been selected based on judgmental sampling. The study used unit level data for the leading states of Indian leather Industry − namely, Tamil Nadu (TN), West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. The study has used Annual Survey of Industry data from 2007-2008 to 2011-2012. The proposed hypotheses have been tested using WarpPLS 5.0 software.

The structural equation analysis of unit-wise leather industry data supports a significant bi-directional negative relationship between social performance and economic performance among all the selected states. In contrast, the relationship between economic performance and environmental performance, as expected and supported by many existing theories, has shown a bidirectional positive relationship. However, the relationship between social and environmental performance has shown quite mysterious and mixed trends. TN has depicted significantly negative coefficients, which could be attributed to higher pressure for environmental compliance that might have led to a trade-off between the two to gain cost competitiveness.

Unavailability of data for many critical indicators is the biggest limitation of this study.

The sustainability framework proposed in this work is an original contribution of authors to the existing literature. Moreover, this study on the Indian leather industry fills the gap and resolves the mystery of interconnection among the dimensions of sustainability.

The purpose of this study is to use the framework of stakeholder analysis in a participatory democracy, used in forest management planning, for arriving at the best management option for selected sacred groves of Kachchh. This is achieved by accounting for economic, cultural and ecological values and the resulting outcomes in the complex institutional mechanism. Additionally, this study provides a framework for complex decision-making that characterizes the management of sacred groves involving multiple criteria and options accounting for multiple stakeholders that involve conflicting interests.

The analytical hierarchy process was used to calculate the global priorities of management options using the relative importance of stakeholders, weights of different decision criteria to arrive at the best management practice for selected groves of Kachchh. The global priorities of management options rank management practices based on stakeholders' values and their effects on the choice of management strategy as well as on the potential to attain a compromise between competing interests. For this purpose, survey responses of 141 individuals belonging to seven different stakeholder categories were analyzed. Along with focus group discussions, and personal interviews, a stratified random sampling technique was used to survey respondents.

Based on the global priority weights of the alternatives, it is determined that the restoration management option (guggal is restored by planting new guggal sapplings, cattle grazing is prohibited and high levels of ecosystem goods and services are provided) had the highest score, followed by the preservation management option (grazing is allowed on the periphery, juvenile guggal is preserved and moderate ecosystem goods and services are provided). Therefore, restoration of sacred groves is the best management practice of sacred groves in West Kachchh, offering a compromise between maximizing provision of ecosystem services and economic benefits in terms of allowing cattle grazing.

Though there are several studies on best management practices for community-owned forests, irrigation systems, and pasture lands, and the role of local institutions in sustaining these common-pool resources; such studies for sacred groves are absent, despite sacred groves being one of the longest surviving common-pool resources that has sustained it over several decades. This is the first study that uses the framework of stakeholder analysis to arrive at the best management practice for sacred groves. The uniqueness of the study lies in a comprehensive evaluation of ecological–economic–cultural interests of multiple stakeholders toward management of sacred groves.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of inclined magnetic field, variable viscosity and Cattaneo–Christov heat and mass flux theories on the steady MHD free convective boundary layer flow of viscous, incompressible and electrically conducting water-driven silver and titanium-oxide nanofluids over a vertical stretching sheet.

The boundary layer equations of momentum, energy and nanoparticle concentration are partial differential equations in nature, which are reduced to nonlinear ordinary differential equations by means of similarity transformations. The resulting nonlinear equations are solved analytically by means of optimal homotopy analysis method.

Assessments with numerical results are performed and are found to be in an excellent agreement. Numerical results of the skin friction factor, the local Nusselt number and the local Sherwood number are obtained through tables. The effects of various physical parameters on the velocity, temperature and nanoparticles fraction are incorporated through graphs. The study analyzes the efficiency of heat transfer of nanofluids in cooling plants and rubber sheets.

No research works have been conducted to evaluate the effects of various physical phenomena on the copper and titanium nanofluids flow.

The purpose of the current article is to explore the rotational behavior on nanofluid flow over an exponentially stretching surface. Heat and mass flux are formulated upon Cattaneo–Christov theory.

Effect of thermophoretic, Brownian motion and thermally convective conditions is further retained. Novel boundary layer approximations are applied to transform the governing equations of continuity, momentum, energy and nanoparticle volume fraction. Convergent series solutions are obtained to manage the rotating flow with the aid of homotopy analysis method (HAM).

Depending on the several dimensionless parameters including the local rotation parameter the Prandtl number Pr, the thermophoresis parameter, the Brownian motion parameter, the Lewis number Le, Biot number Bi, Deborah number in terms of heat flux relaxation parameter and Deborah number in terms of mass flux relaxation parameter with the dimensionless physical quantities are deliberated through graphs. Present results are also likened with the foregoing results in significance.

No such assumptions have been made for the development of analytical solution so far.