Contradictory Pulls Research Articles

Emerging Partnerships of SDGs and HRM Practices During the Pandemic: A Study of the Indian IT Industry

Post-pandemic, the world of work has changed, and the pandemic has accelerated the responsible business agenda, representing a huge opportunity for the human-centric approach to HRM to transform the world of work. The drive towards responsible and sustainable business demands a new way of thinking, and the old conventional thinking approach addressing piece-meal solutions is an approach of the past. The human resource management (HRM) practices of multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries in India in the IT sector are studied within an institutional theory framework to look at how MNCs operating in India are incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Applying the tenets of DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) work, we understand that an MNC subsidiary located in India will be influenced by both potentially contradictory pulls from institutional factors in the local environment and international isomorphic processes. With a qualitative approach and primary data collected via in-depth interviews with 52 HR professionals (including host and subsidiaries) from 8 MNCs, our findings indicate that the subsidiaries based in India are mostly adopting the pattern exhibited by larger organizations in their environment that are viewed as successful (mimetic isomorphism) in implementing the SDGs. There is still a huge scope for improvement in these subsidiaries in terms of investing in people’s capabilities for future sustainable work. The research contributes to the bourgeoning literature on HRM practices and how MNC subsidiaries operate in different contexts and cultural settings in the IT sector.

Forging the nation state: an advertising history of Tata Steel, India

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide an advertising history of Tata Steel from its inception in 1907 to 2007 when it completed 100 years of operation. The authors use postcolonial theory to highlight the intertwining of advertising with the broader project of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nation-building.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a visual analysis of a compilation of advertisements published by Tata Steel to commemorate 100 years of its existence, spanning the years from 1907 to 2007. They also used ads and posters available on the website of the Tata Steel Archives. Published work on Tata Steel such as books and papers provided contextualization.FindingsAdvertising creatives, through selective deployment of anticolonial discourses, manage the contradictory pulls of emergent nationalism on the one hand and the pragmatic need to work with the colonial administration on the other. However, such a negotiation leads to moments of slippage, where advertising reinforces colonial tropes. At a broader level, the authors suggest that despite attempts to draw on subversive discourses of resistance used by nationalists, Tata Steel’s advertising is inescapably intertwined with the larger matrix of colonial and capitalist power.Originality/valueThis study contributes to a non-Western perspective on advertising history. Further, it provides understanding of the marketing activities of a large corporation, which straddles the colonial and postcolonial era of India, an important economy.

Between Criticality and Conformism: Citizenship and Education in Post-independent India

This article attempts to investigate the three strands of citizenship, nationalism and education and their interconnectedness in India after independence. It seeks to address questions like how has the post-colonial state in India visualized its models of citizenship through its education policies and programmes and what has become of their fate? In what ways the changing nature of public versus private education has shaped contested models of citizenship? What challenges are thrown at the models of citizenship that the Indian state has tried to posit through education? It is argued that the journey of citizenship in post-independent India is that of contradictory pulls around key strands of ethno-cultural nationalism and civic nationalism and around an economically productive nation versus an economic consumer nation. The article will look at some of the key policy shifts and operational models and attempt to locate the dynamic behind those shifts.

Women in the Nordic Resistance Movement and their online media practices: between internalised misogyny and “embedded feminism”

ABSTRACT This paper is based on a case study of the online media practices of the neo-Nazi organisation, the Nordic Resistance Movement, conducted in the context of an ongoing project on contemporary forms of violent extremism in Sweden. Focusing on the activities of female “online influencers”, the paper explores the contradictory discourses around the role of women as “race warriors” and “Nordic wives” as this is articulated both by the women in the organisation themselves and in the online universe of the organisation more generally. On the one hand, women’s positions are determined and heavily policed by men in an organisation that openly propagates women’s subordination to men and their natural and biological role in the realm of homemaking. On the other, the discourses produced by these women are saturated by ideas of female empowerment, sisterhood, emancipation and the importance of women in the reproduction of the white race. The content analysis of online propaganda produced by female activists about the role of women positions these contradictory pulls of “White femininity” inherent to the white supremacist movements at the current political juncture in which the extreme right is growing and actively looking to recruit women as part of a broader strategy to “mainstream” in Sweden and mobilise internationally.

London's nocturnal queer geographies

There are contradictory pulls in neoliberal cities. On the one hand there has been an acceptance of mainstream Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ+) identities, as celebrated for example through commercially sponsored and officially endorsed Pride rallies. On the other, real estate-led global city competitiveness is affecting our capacity to secure the heritage of queer publics, and for them to keep a foothold in the spaces they have historically occupied. Internationally, researchers are charting the effects of gentrification on neighbourhoods associated with LGBTQ+ communities. In the UK, since LGBTQ+ rights have been won in large part through European Union-led legislation, the trajectory of an increasing liberalisation of attitudes and legal protections is not guaranteed. Recent data shows losses of a wide range of cultural and social spaces, but the provision of LGBTQ+ nightvenues has suffered an even more dramatic fall than has been seen for pubs in the UK overall; and LGBTQ+ night-venues have suffered disproportionately in London’s wider losses of nightclubs and grassroots music venues, as they have been rapidly succumbing to commercial residential and infrastructure-led developments. If pubs, generally, are important to the social life of neighbourhoods, LGBTQ+ venues function as vital infrastructure for these groups, providing spaces of care and community against wider contexts of oppression and violence. In London, as in other cities internationally, increasing attention is being paid to LGBTQ+ heritage alongside that of other minority groups. But are these efforts in vain, given that t

Pulled in Two Directions. Being in Concert a Leader to Some and a Follower to Others

Some individuals, in organizations are in a position where they need to attend in concert to their role as a leader to some, and a follower to others. It is important that they perform both roles e...

Trans(affective)mediation: feeling our way from paper to digitized zines and back again

ABSTRACT Zines emerged as quintessentially print texts, with paper forming the vulnerable, palpable body of the text. Efforts to digitally archive zines promise to increase access to them and to extend their political projects. Particularly for minoritarian communities, digitization resonates as an urgent process with radical potential. Alongside such possibilities stand concerns about what it means and, particularly, how it feels to transform zines from paper to digital modes. Through engagement with the Queer Zine Archive Project and the POC (People of Color) Zine Project, we argue that transmediation of print zines into digital artifacts is rife with affective dynamics. In relation to these affective dynamics, we take a reflexive stance of ambivalence—not indifference, but rather a strongly felt set of disparate, sometimes dissonant or contradictory pulls toward and away from digitization. We offer the concept of trans(affective)mediation as an intervention that treats print zines and digital zines as distinct and distinctly affective domains, with distinct possibilities and constraints, coherences and incoherences, and intensities. Additionally, trans(affective)mediation names the third space between print and digital that calls for our care and understanding if we are to appreciate and even participate in the politics of queer, POC, and queer POC zine cultures.

The Politics of India’s Neighbourhood Policy in South Asia

India’s policy orientation towards its immediate neighbouring countries in South Asia has been subjected to analyses mainly through the prism of foreign policy. In this article, neighbourhood is taken as a prism to categorise the phases of India’s policy since Independence towards these countries. In this effort, certain trends have been identified in Indian foreign policy that cut across chronology of Indian governments in office. The article critically interrogates the Indian policy package towards India’s immediate neighbours through interest based strategies that suit the changing external international political milieu. The Cold War years, the contradictory pulls of economic globalisation and regionalism and the drive towards global multipolarity affected the policy orientations of India towards its neighbours. The article concludes that the political logic of neighbourhood policy of India in South Asia is conditioned by adhocism.

Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period (review)

Reviewed by: Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period Naomi Standen Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period. Edited by Don J. Wyatt. Houndmills, Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN 978-1-4039-6084-9. Illustrations. List of Middle Period Dynasties. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 307. $84.95. This collection does more than it says on the tin. The jacket copy claims that the book is about turf and ethnicity, but this tendentiously oversimplifies the interest, sophistication and interconnectedness of the approaches taken by the authors themselves, which I can only hint at here. Don Wyatt explains in his brief introduction that each chapter examines intersections between borders, war and identity, where these form a matrix in which, among other things, physical borders and conceptual boundaries are things that people may fight over (in both senses), and fighting generates identity issues because of the need to choose sides. Identity here is more than mere ethnicity, as set out with [End Page 1305] especial clarity by Michael Brose. For him, identity was one resource among many used by Uyghur rulers in the Tarim and Uyghurs employed in Yuan China to manage their relationships with the Mongols. In particular, indications of Uyghur origins could usefully imply possession of skills valued by the Mongols, but identity was not determinative. Identity defined as political allegiance was also mutable. Several essays explore the agency of those on China’s frontiers, north and south, whose loyalty was a powerful negotiating tool to the extent that it was valued by neighboring courts. David Graff argues that in the eighth-ninth centuries shared concern over nomad activities inspired a mutually beneficial alliance between the northeastern province of Youzhou and the Tang dynasty, which allowed Youzhou its autonomy in return for frontier security. Turning south, Sherry Mou relates the non-Chinese Consort Xian’s success in retaining independence from the Chen dynasty (557–89) for her followers in the Guangdong region, and offers a gendered analysis of changing emphases in Ming and modern versions of the story. James Anderson, engaging with Vietnamese historiography, gives a nuanced account of court-to-court agreements to discipline unruly frontiersmen degenerating into war through a combination of local choices of allegiance and central efforts to impose greater control. War, however, led to a negotiated fixed border, which made peace. Agency has limits, and other essays consider the parameters of the middle-period world through examining central efforts to control and manage the frontiers. This was difficult and could bring failure. Michael McGrath, for instance, describes Song-Xia relations to show that neither wanted war, but that lack of interest, of openmindedness and of full engagement with the frontier seemingly made them powerless to avoid conflict. Ruth Mostern explains Southern Song handling of contradictory pulls towards abolishing counties made unproductive by the Jin wars and establishing them to spread the cost of garrisoning the new border in Huainan. Continual attention meant that these strategic counties effectively dictated policy for the province. Turning from territorial to moral, ritual and cosmic space, M.A. Butler explains the principles of the Hidden Period technique that allowed skilled practitioners to jump time and space for battlefield advantage. By writing down the rituals, the court tried to appropriate their military efficacy and to control adepts whose direct access to the divine required, dangerously, no mediation from the Son of Heaven. One purpose of the volume is to illustrate that war was as much part of the Chinese toolbox as diplomacy. Military means, however, present their own problems: cost, destruction, overstretch, unpredictability. Many chapters discuss responses to such realities, sometimes providing commentary on the definition of war as a method of making the enemy change their mind. At state level, Peter Lorge offers a masterly discussion of the Great Ditch along the Song-Liao border as an effective, if reluctantly adopted, scheme that helped both rulers to change their minds enough to agree the Chanyuan Covenant of 1005. At the individual level, Don Wyatt explores how and why Wang Dan, despite lacking inherent sympathy for the ‘peace camp’, nevertheless developed the non-belligerent stance that has...

Beyond Broadcast Yourself™: The Future of Youtube

Since its launch in early 2005, video-sharing website YouTube has emerged as a culturally, politically and economically significant medium, and as one of the inheritors of the social role played by broadcast television. However, its continued growth and journey to profitability are not guaranteed. This paper queries the future of YouTube by exploring the tension inherent in the site's three key characteristics embodied within its slogan ‘Broadcast Yourself™’. The site is based within regimes of consumer production and identity practices, yet it is also located within a traditional fiscal economy as indicated by the trademark identifier. The contradictory pulls of these positions pose challenges for YouTube and its parent company Google. The difficulty of sustaining an emergent social economy alongside the requirements of advertising-driven economics raises questions about the future of YouTube, and indicates the complex terrain of what lies beyond broadcasting.

Parental education, time in paid work and time with children: an Australian time‐diary analysis

How does parental education affect time in the paid workforce and time with children? Potentially, the effects are contradictory. An economic perspective suggests higher education means a pull to the market. Human capital theory predicts that, because higher education improves earning capacity, educated women face higher opportunity costs if they forego wages, so will allocate more time to market work and less to unpaid domestic labour. But education may also exercise a pull to the home. Attitudes to child rearing are subject to strong social norms, and parents with higher levels of education may be particularly receptive to the current social ideal of attentive, sustained and intensive nurturing. Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time-use Survey 1997, this study offers a snapshot of how these contradictory pulls play out in daily life. It finds that in Australia, households with university-educated parents spend more daily time with children than other households in physical care and in developmental activities. Sex inequality in care time persists, but fathers with university education do contribute more time to care of children, including time alone with them, than other fathers. Mothers with university education allocate more daily time than other mothers to both childcare and to paid work.

Structuring small firms for rapid growth

Small firms confront significant dilemmas as they struggle to capitalize on growth opportunities. Surges in demand frequently result in the hiring of additional operating and administrative personnel. Rapid growth in employment, however, creates managerial problems whose resolution requires firms to design collateral systems that both mobilize staff attention toward a shared vision and support the firm's strategic outlook (Hambrick and Crozier 1985; Kotter and Sathe 1978). This article reports on a cross-sectional study of 95 small U.S. firms that experienced a five-year surge in growth. Findings indicate that the internal systems designed by these firms to support their rapid growth varied systematically by strategic orientation and degree of product diversity. Contrary to expectations, the relationship between strategy and structure failed to demonstrate a significant effect on these firms' levels of performance. Indeed, the data suggest that in fashioning these systems, firms' managements may, in fact, be responding to contradictory pulls. 1. Bureaucratization versus Decentralization. Increased hiring stimulates bureaucracy: firms formalize procedures as staffing doubles and triples. Employee participation and autonomy decline and internal labor markets develop. Tied to growth, however, is also an increased diversity in product offerings that favors less formalized decision processes, greater decentralization, and the recognition that the firm's existing human resources lack the necessary skills to manage the broadening portfolio. 2. Environment versus Strategy. High environmental turbulence and competitive conditions favor company cultures that support risk taking, autonomy, and employee participation in decision making. Firms confront competitors, however, through strategies whose implementation depends on the design of formal systems that inhibit risk taking and autonomy. 3. Strategic Emphases on Quality versus Cost versus Innovation. Rapidly growing firms strive to simultaneously control costs, enhance product quality, and improve product offerings. Minimizing costs and undercutting competitors' product prices, however, are best achieved by traditional hierarchical systems of decision making and evaluation that contrast with the kinds of autonomous processes most likely to encourage the pursuit of product quality and innovation. The findings suggest that managing surges in growth involves multiple challenges: resolving the stresses and strains induced by attempts to control costs while simultaneously enhancing quality and creating new products to maintain competitive parity, and centralizing to retain control while simultaneously decentralizing to encourage the contributions of autonomous, self-managed professionals to the embryonic corporate culture. Rapidly growing firms are challenged to strike a balance between these multiple pulls when designing their managerial systems.