Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli

Despite widespread adoption, Conversational Agents (CAs) often lack Social Intelligence (SI), causing user dissatisfaction and abandonment. This study examines how social characteristics, Authenticity (AU) and Damage Control (DC), shape Perceived Social Intelligence (PSI) and influence Anthropomorphic Response (AR). Drawing on Social Response Theory (SRT), a 2 & times;2 between-subjects factorial experiment with 226 participants viewing prerecorded human-CA conversations examines direct, interactive, and mediating effects. Results indicate both AU and DC positively impact PSI and AR, with PSI mediating these relationships. Notably, DC's effect on AR amplifies when AU is low, revealing a compensatory relationship. Theoretically, this study advances SRT by demonstrating that users mindfully evaluate CAs' social characteristics rather than responding mindlessly. Practically, identified substitution effect between AU and DC offers strategic flexibility, enabling organizations to prioritize one characteristic based on constraints and inform importance of social characteristics in CA design to enhance human-CA collaboration and improve overall service quality.

PurposeThis study examines how humanitarian organizations can achieve sustainability through strategic supplier selection, ensuring productivity and performance by integrating economic, social and environmental dimensions. This proposes connects disaster preparedness, sustainability and performance management with the procurement decision.Design/methodology/approachA hybrid Fermatean Fuzzy-based multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework, integrating Criteria Importance Through Inter-Criteria Correlation (CRITIC) and Combined Compromise Solution (CoCoSo) method is applied to prioritize sustainability criteria and rank suppliers. The developed framework was further validated using an India-based Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), ensuring its practical relevance and decision-making accuracy.FindingsThe result of the combined CRITIC-CoCoSo method indicates that the economic dimension holds the highest weightage, followed by social and environmental, reinforcing the dominance of cost-related factors in supplier selection. Additionally, key performance indicators (KPIs), such as delivery efficiency, crisis responsiveness and environmental compliance in post-selection, improve the performance and resilience of humanitarian logistics.Practical implicationsOur study provides practical insights to operationalize sustainability through evidence-based supplier evaluation, strengthening both short-term responsiveness and long-term resilience. This approach offers a robust, adaptable and scalable decision-support system for performance management in the humanitarian supply chain.Originality/valueThis study integrates three dimensions of sustainability into the supplier selection in the humanitarian supply chain for the procurement of relief items. The proposed framework strengthens performance management in humanitarian supply chains by integrating KPI-driven post-selection monitoring.

Scholarly work on corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) has frequently focussed on incident-based narratives, with more recent studies exploring the complex interplay among various stakeholders and their involvement in perpetuating environmental injustice (EI). Focussing on the relationship between CSiR and EI, we examine the factors that increase the risk of CSiR occurrences, their impact on various stakeholders and related responses, and measures that can prevent or mitigate CSiR. These issues are investigated via means of media discourse analysis (MDA), developing thematic coding using data extracted from various sources in the public domain and available on the internet. Outcomes from the MDA identify a clear and perpetuating link between CSiR and different forms of EI—distributive injustice, procedural injustice, and recognitional injustice. Our findings contribute to the CSiR–EI literature by analysing the structural conditions that reveal and shape the visibility and perceptions of environmental harm; identifying media exposure as a threshold for stakeholder contestation; and offering a typology of CSiR–EI dynamics grounded in sectoral and geographic contexts.

PurposeThis study examined the inclusive experiences of neurodivergent employees in India, focusing on their lived experiences (i.e. expectations vs realities) and their recommendations for improvement.Design/methodology/approachThe semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 clinically diagnosed neurodivergent participants, chosen through purposive and snowball sampling from diverse sectors across India. The responses were evaluated using abductive analysis to identify key themes.FindingsThe study revealed a significant gap between employees' expectations and the reality of inclusivity for neurodivergent individuals. The findings are discussed across three levels of the career ecosystem: micro (self-efficacy, cognitive integrity, precision and perfection issues, and irritation and anger issues), meso (collaboration and communication styles, career growth and promotion, flexible task structures and role clarity, and supervisor and peer support) and macro (systemic inclusion, policy and culture).Originality/valueThis study advances knowledge of career actors at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of the career ecosystem and their intersections in the context of neurodivergent employees' experiences in India.

For new ventures in contested fields, securing legitimacy is a paramount challenge. In the platform economy, firms often enter with a potent entrepreneurship rhetoric, but as they face contestation over their labor and regulatory practices, this rhetoric can devolve into a calculated misrepresentation-a legitimacy lie. Yet, the process by which such lies are performed and defended over time as a form of institutional work remains undertheorized, leaving a gap in our understanding of how platform firms achieve institutional entrenchment. Uncovering this process, we theorize the legitimacy lie as a form of dark institutional work. Using 47 driver interviews, extensive archival materials, court documents, and leaked internal communications (the Uber Files), we analyze the contested operations of Uber and Ola in India (2013-2020). Our analysis reveals a recursive two-phase process. In Phase 1 (Proactive Framing), platforms construct the legitimacy of the "micro-entrepreneur." In Phase 2 (Reactive Escalation), legitimacy threats trigger a defensive escalation of dark work, including sharp increases in symbolic rhetoric, the material imposition of opaque algorithmic control, and the relational co-optation of powerful stakeholders. This dark work, in turn, provokes driver resistance, which constitutes a new legitimacy threat that refuels the cycle. This recursive process functions as the mechanism that enables the platform's institutional entrenchment. We advance institutional work scholarship by theorizing this process, explaining how the successful performance of a legitimacy lie allows a venture to cross a critical threshold from a fragile reliance on normative legitimacy to a state of durable structural power.