Rupashree Baral

Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP integrates the data of all business areas within the organization. It is a complex technology involving different type of end users and implementing it in developing countries like India makes it even more difficult owing to the cultural and social differences. Effective usage of ERP leads to its success. However, degree of usage depends on many individual, organizational and technological factors. The post-ERP implementation is found to have impact on the user behavior and hence it is also essential to understand the impacts of the acceptance on the individual. This paper identifies the factors that affect the usage of ERP. A conceptual research framework is proposed to find the combined effect of the individual, organizational and technological factors on the ERP usage using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The model also seeks to find out the impact of usage of ERP on panoptic empowerment, job satisfaction and individual performance.

This study examines the role of personal and socio-cultural factors on entrepreneurial decisions and performance of women-owned small businesses in India. Using an interpretative approach, we explored the entrepreneurial journey of twenty women entrepreneurs. While the need for flexibility, family orientation, and work-family integration emerged as important personal factors shaping women’s decision to pursue entrepreneurship, family support emerged as a crucial factor for the survival and performance of the business. Gender discrimination and stereotype emerged as societal challenges, and the inadequacy of financial resources and limited institutional support posed as structural challenges. Strong motivation, risk-taking attitude, and persistence are the personal attributes that helped in nurturing the desire to pursue entrepreneurship. Apart from the evidence of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, strong gender role ideology emerged as a deep-rooted cultural dimension affecting the attitude and behavior of women entrepreneurs. The findings will aid in the development of programs and policies to promote women entrepreneurship.

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.