Self-care for the researcher: dark tourism in Varanasi,India

ABSTRACT

Dark tourism is a popular niche of tourism that allows tourists to come into close proximity with death, atrocity, and the macabre, and therefore has the potential to be an emotional and even traumatic encounter for tourists. While this context has inspired tourism researchers to investigate dark tourists’ motivations, as well as the marketing and representation of dark tourism sites, we have yet to attend to its implications for the researcher. This paper analyzes the emotional experiences and aftermath of fieldwork at the cremation grounds of Varanasi, India, which involved working closely with tourists, Doms, and Aghoris by focusing on the relations of reflexivity, positionality, and emotionality. As a result, we suggest a number of reflexive and self-care practices to be put into place so as to attend to the researchers’ emotional well-being in the fieldwork process.     

Greater Reliance on Major Customers and Auditor Going-Concern Opinions

In this study, we predict and provide evidence that distressed firms that rely more heavily on major customers for sales have a comparatively higher incidence of receiving going-concern opinions (GCOs). Moreover, we find that the effect of increased reliance on major customers is driven by firms that are more distressed. We also theorize that variations in key characteristics of the relationship between a distressed firm and its largest major customer are incrementally linked to GCOs, and present evidence consistent with this. Specifically, we find that the effect of greater reliance on major customers is driven by firms that are relatively smaller than their largest major customer. Additionally, we find that greater reliance on major customers is positively (negatively) associated with GCOs when firms are in a shorter (longer) relationship with their major customer and when firms have a different auditor to (same auditor as) the largest major customer. Overall, our study indicates that supply chain relationships are relevant business risks associated with auditors' going-concern assessments.     

SEQUENTIAL EXPERT ADVICE: SUPERIORITY OF CLOSED‐DOOR MEETINGS

Two career‐concerned experts sequentially give advice to a Bayesian decision maker (D). We find that secrecy dominates transparency, yielding superior decisions for D. Secrecy empowers the expert moving late to be pivotal more often. Further, (i) only secrecy enables the second expert to partially communicate her information and its high precision to D and swing the decision away from first expert's recommendation; (ii) if experts have high average precision, then the second expert is effective only under secrecy. These results are obtained when experts only recommend decisions. If they also report the quality of advice, fully revealing equilibrium may exist.     

Temporality and the role of shocks in explaining changes in socioemotional wealth and entrepreneurial orientation of small and medium family enterprises

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This paper explores the relationship between the nature of shocks (family vs. business related), the relative importance of socioemotional...     

The transition from linear economy to circular economy for sustainability among SMEs: A study on prospects,impediments, and prerequisites

The circular economy (CE) is a more holistic approach that advocates towards extracting the value from the waste and reaching sustainability goals. The objective of the present study is to highlight the prospects, impediments, and prerequisites while transiting from the linear economy (LE) to CE of SMEs. The study gathers information on prospects, impediments, and prerequisites for the transition of LE to a CE from recent studies . A semi-structured interview questionnaire was prepared, and a survey was conducted on representatives of six SMEs . Further, six caselets were developed to understand the prospects, impediments, and prerequisites based on the findings of the interview and previous information gained from existing literature . The major prospects favoring transition from LE to CE found in the study are significance of 3R (reduce and reuse and recycling) approach, CE leads to competitive advantage, recycling attracts consumers in few cases, CE helps in achieving sustainability goals and reuse of materials are significant in resource conservation. There are certain impediments found such as issues associated with awareness, recyclability issues, financial challenges, and weak management vision of SMEs towards CE implementation. Other resource-based impediments were found related to trained employees, lack of experience. Whereas, consumer acceptability is also a major concern towards implementing CE. The findings of the study suggest major prerequisites towards CE implementations such as strong “management will,” innovation, technology up-gradation, training to employees, motivation, and appropriate guidelines. Government pressure to implement CE cannot be an effective step towards the transition of LE to CE.     

‘The smell of death and the smell of life’: authenticity,anxiety and perceptions of death at Varanasi’s cremation grounds

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to an understanding of existential authenticity and existential anxiety in tourism studies through an investigation of tourists’ perceptions of death, the Self, and ‘others’ at the Hindu cremation grounds in Varanasi, India. Encounters with death at dark tourism sites serve as reminders of one’s own mortality affecting one’s attitude towards death, perception of self, and even challenging one’s personal values. Existentialists assert that anxiety is a condition of existential authenticity, and therefore moments of the existentially authentic experience are not always pleasurable. This paper argues that confrontation with death, as exemplified by the Aghori rituals and the cremation grounds in Varanasi, offers tourists an opportunity to examine the inevitability that life will end and to engage with this existential predicament and anxiety in an embodied sense, thereby pushing some of them towards life changes in the pursuit of existential authenticity.     

Modeling the migration of cultural goods: a macro-economic study of domestic Chinese cinema

This article investigates the migration of cultural goods such as movies in the burgeoning commercial exhibition marketplace of China. Based on prior research on the movie industry and theatrical releases, this empirical study models the dynamic relationships between cinema attendance and the number of cinema screens in response to consumer mindset shifts in terms of predetermined and exogenous variables. These relationships are established and estimated by applying the Vector Auto-Regression (VAR) and Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) techniques. The regression analyses are executed over 96 observations spanning from May 2005 to April 2013. A key empirical finding is that cultural goods such as movies are affected by a variety of market and economic factors. Another significant finding is that income and admission price will not significantly affect the Chinese cinema-goers’ consumption behaviors, whereas they may alter the market expectation of the exhibitors. In recent years, the prevalence of Internet options has further promoted a more competitive market of choice, quality, and prices. This is an area worthy of further scholarly investigation.     

Revisiting the Purpose of Selling: Toward a Model of Responsible Selling

Selling as a profession and sales management as an organizational function have undergone major changes that were driven by the evolutionary journey of the marketing discipline. The extant value cocreation paradigm is recrafting the purpose of selling. This paper explores the conceptual development of a selling paradigm that is more responsible to its customers. Specifically, in Business-to-Business (B2B) context, the cost of any selling behavior that compromises customer interest could be of disastrous proportions. Building on the theoretical foundations of self-regulation and job demands-resources theory, this paper develops a conceptual model of responsible selling by integrating self-leadership literature with the emerging paradigm of value-based selling. The conceptual model outlines several research propositions for empirical validation and discusses its potential implications for sales managers and sales organizations.     

Government Expenditure in India: Composition and Multipliers

We estimate fiscal multipliers for total, capital (capex), and revenue (revex) Indian government expenditure using a two variable Structural Vector Auto-Regression (SVAR). Our quarterly data allows us to estimate both short- and long-run multipliers. We then extend and re-estimate the model including supply shocks and the monetary policy response sequentially and together and re-estimate the multipliers. The long-run capex multiplier remains much larger than the corresponding revex multiplier in all the estimations. The short run impact multiplier is the highest for revex, but does not rise after the first quarter. The capex peak multiplier in the 2nd quarter is 1.6–1.9 times larger. The cumulative multiplier is also the highest for capex, 2.4–6.5 times the size of the revex multiplier. Capex also reduces inflation more over the long-term. Despite this, capex shows greater volatility since it is more vulnerable to discretionary cuts. Monetary accommodation of capex and revex is allowed to differ. It varies in the absence/presence of supply shocks. The combination of a direct cut in capex and monetary tightening in response to a supply shock reduces the capex multiplier. The results are consistent with an elastic long-run aggregate supply. Disaggregated evaluation of spending policy, therefore, gives useful insights.

     

Does Regional Financial Development Matter for Growth? Evidence from Indian States

The paper investigates finance–growth relationship across 26 Indian states over the period 1981–2012 in a panel setting. We use four indicators of financial development: credit-GSDP ratio, deposit-GSDP ratio, credit-deposit ratio and branch density and apply panel generalized method of moments (GMM) techniques. We observe positive and significant effect of financial development on economic growth and our findings are robust across alternate indicators of financial development and model specifications. Our findings highlight pivotal role played by financial intermediaries in fostering savings mobilization and financing investment activities across states through channels of deposit mobilization, expansion of credit and greater branch expansion in unbanked locations and consequent reduction of transactions costs. These findings are consistent with observations that much of India’s superior growth performance is attributed to high level of domestic savings. The paper also takes care of issues of bias and precision of various GMM estimators arising out of small sample typically prevalent in empirical growth models like ours.