How IIM Calcutta Fared in Thought Leadership in 2008

     What an extraordinary year this has been!  Iconic companies, the ones who set benchmarks for management practices, companies like General Motors, Citibank, Meryl Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland have been felled and now exist because of the kindness of their governments.  World over, there is a sudden loss of faith in the power of markets, in the sagacity and expertise of corporate chieftains. The very role of the private sector as an economic institution that benefits society is being questioned. Is a new world in the making where there will be a new balance between the role of the state and that of the market? Will the present world economic system that is driven by what some call "excessive" consumer consumption, particularly in the United States, be replaced by some new architecture?
    
     Clearly, thoughtful people throughout the world are reflecting on all this.

     Today I will walk you through some of the thinking that is going on within the IIM Calcutta faculty and graduate students as our contribution to this discourse. As you will see, the quality of this thinking is high indeed as some of the most prestigious journals in the world have published this work.

     As a first example, let's take the extraordinary turn of events in which Indian companies long used to playing a defensive game in our domestic markets are taking the battle abroad and in the process transforming themselves in to multinationals.  Raveendra Chittoor, M.B. Sarkar, Sougata Ray, and Preet Aulakh looked at a specific case of this  phenomena, the story of Indian pharmaceutical companies stepping out into the world in their , 'Third-World Copycats' to 'Emerging Multinationals': Institutional Changes and Organizational Transformation in the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry. This found a place in the world renowned management journal, Organization Science.

     Then there is an equally extraordinary phenomenon, the acquisition activity by Indian companies in international markets. Sathyajit Gubbi, Preet Aulakh, Sougata Ray, M.B. Sarkar, and Raveendra Chittoor took a look at this and their paper, "Do International Acquisitions by Emerging Economy Firms Create Shareholder Value? The Case of Indian Firms" has been accepted for publication by Journal of International Business Studies, one of the highest rated journals across all management disciplines. What is significant here is that Sathyajit is the first ever doctoral student from India to get an acceptance in any “A” rated journal before completing the dissertation.

     Does the founding context of firms leave a long-term imprint on them and constrain their future degrees of freedom? This question has importance in India as many family-dominated business groups face the new ,dynamic environment. Indrajit Mukherjee, a doctoral student studied this issue and his paper was nominated  for the Best Conference Paper Award in the Strategic Management Society Annual Conference last year at Cologne in Germany.

     These three  papers are from our Strategy Group which is growing into a formidable research team.  During the past three years, five of their doctoral students namely, Raveendra Chittoor, Indrajit Mukharjee, Sathyajit Gubi, Anubha Sinha and Somnath Datta presented or will be presenting more than 20 conference papers in top tier conferences such as Academy of Management Annual Meetings and Academy of International Business Annual Meetings. Additionally, half a dozen of papers have been published by them in high quality international journals such as JIBS and Organization Science

     Let me move next to that issue that is centre-stage during the current financial crisis that grips the world- the issue of governance. Governance, particularly good governance is like love, something that everyone aspires to and wants but seems so hard to get in today's world. What better time to publish original insights into governance. "The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Good Governance" is a very timely book by Prof Munshi,  Retired Professor of Sociology here, Biju Paul Abraham  one of our young professors and, Soma Chaudhuri  of Vanderbilt University..The central argument of the book is that any serious engagement with good governance must go beyond an exclusive reliance on the state or the market and must explore different modes of partnerships, including public participation.

     Another perspective on governance was contributed by Prof Sushil Khanna- he reviewed 30 years of Indian experience in corporate governance and contributed a paper to the European Conference on Corporate Governance in Brussels.

     One of the features of today's uncertain world is that a firm's external environment can suddenly and irretrievably change. This shock can be brought about by technological evolution or government policy change or, as we recently experienced, a crisis in housing markets in far-off places.  Suddenly a firm finds that human assets created arduously over many years are mismatched to the new challenges. How does the Human Resource policy of a firm respond in such an event?  Sumita Kelkar, a doctoral student, guided by Prof Prodip Sett explored the dimensions of HR flexibility and postulated a new one which they call "flexibility inducing HR practices". Their paper, "Environmental Dynamism, HR Flexibility, and Firm Performance: Analysis of a Multi-Level Causal Model”  has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Human Resource Management which is  one of the top two Human Resources Management - journals in the world.

     This is Sumita’s second publication in this journal.. Her first article was accepted for publication by IJHRM early this year. Both these articles are out of her thesis work at IIM Calcutta.
Contributions from our Finance and Control Group include a novel NPV-based method of pricing telecom infrastructure by Prof Ashok Bannerjee and Debasis Saha and presented at the Hawaii International Conference on Business.

     Contributions of our Operations Group include a paper on supply Chain issues by Prof Subroto Mitra presented at a conference in Hawaii; another paper from him on the Logistics Industry at a conference in Lugano, Switzerland; a design of a game management software for the Oil industry by Prof Balram Avittathur presented at the International Service Systems conference in Melbourne , Australia; on modeling regional electricity load by Sahadeb Sarkar at a Honolulu Conference; a strategic planning model for freight movement by Prof MN Pal, Sourav Basu, and Prof Nag presented at a conference in Cartegena de Indias, Colombia; another paper at the same conference by Prof Ashish Chatterjee and Dipankar Bose on Capacity Planning under Demand Uncertainty; one on ordering strategies for short-lifecycle products by Prof Balram Avittathur  presented at the International Symposium of Logistics, Bangkok, Thailand; a paper on probability matching by Prof Rahul Mukherjee at the Yokohma, Japan conference on Stastical Computing and another paper at the same conference by Prof Saibal Chattopadhay on designing pilot samples under certain specific conditions; one on aspects of data envelopment analysis by Prof Sanjeet Singh at a Washington DC conference.

     Every state Chief Minister sees the setting up of an IT services industry as the route to providing high-paying jobs in his state. You see these well constructed apparitions' spring up on the outskirts of our major cities. You can see many for example on the road from Calcutta Airport into town. What is the implication of this kind of frantic building or land use and land markets? MK Satish guided by Prof Annapurna Shaw, took a close look at this in their paper, "Information Technology, and Information Technology Enabled Services Cluster Growth: Impact on Metropolitan Land Use and Land Markets."

     In our attempt to correct various wrongs in our society, we have been experimenting with various kinds of reservations and the jury is still out on which of these deliver the results we hope to get from them. One such experiment is the ongoing reservation of some Gram Panchayat Head positions for women. In a co-authored study, Prof Ragabh Chattopadhyay found that there was a significantly higher investment in drinking water facilities in those Gram Panchayats that were headed for women. The study, "Women as Policy Makers", merited publication in Econometrica, the prestigious quarterly journal of economics. This certainly is a finding that reflects the new era: women make better bosses!

     It is only appropriate that in these troubling times that we look deeply not merely at the technocratic areas of management but also at cultural and value issues.  We have a slew of research papers from IIM Calcutta on these topics. Rohit Varman of our Marketing Group  takes a long , hard look at the phenomena of  Consumer culture  where people  portion pursue, acquire and display goods and services that are valued for non-utilitarian reasons, such as status seeking, envy provocation, and novelty seeking. In one paper, “Weaving a web: subaltern consumers, rising consumer culture, and television”, published in the international journal, Marketing Theory, he points out, among other things the troubling connection marketers make between a consumer culture and other "western values" such as 'democracy' and 'modernization', as if consuming more is essential to being modern. In another article, due for publication in the prestigious international Journal of Consumer Research, Rohit looks at the emerging anti-consumption movement. There was a time such work might have been viewed as in the provenance of socialists, but many of you must have noticed President Obama's remark at the G20 Summit a few days ago that he was not in favor of the "voracious consumer market" that has been the United States for so long.

     Other contributions from our Marketing Group: a methodology for assessing the quality of Education as a service, presented  by Prof Koushiki Choudhury at a conference on Education in Paris; a similar study on service quality in  retail banking presented at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; an empirical classification of the global auto industry by Prof Profulla Agnihotri presented at a conference in Paris.

     Contributions from our MIS Group include the following: Prof Debasis Saha on methods to audit LAN-networks at a Hawaii Conference; a method of accurately computing fidelity in routing trees presented by Prof Parthsarathi Dasgupta at an international workshop at Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK; another paper by him on placement of standard cells and gate arrays at a conference at Montpellier, France;  a paper on using wireless-sensors in agriculture by Prof Somprakash Bandopadhay at a conference in Geneva, Switzerland; a paper on a pernicious form of online behavior, "shilling" ny Prof Ambuj Mahanti and his graduate student, Sanjog Ray at a conference in Patras, Greece; a framework for understanding technology use by virtual teams by Prof Priya Sethuraman and Prof Snjiv Vaidya at a conference at Christ Church, New Zealand; one on the dynamics of growth of Wikipedia presented by Priya, Rahul Roy and Amitava Dutta at a conference in Paris, France; a paper on valuation of combinatorial auctions by Prof Anup Sen, Prof Amitava Bagchi and their doctoral student, Spumyakanthi Chakraborty presented at a conference in Hawaii; Prof Subir Bhattacharya presented a paper on agent-based model for portfolio selection at the same conference; a paper on achieveing fault-tolerance in wireless networks by our doctoral student D Anuragh at a conference in San Francisco.

     Another slant of thinking on values here at IIM Calcutta has been led by Prof Panduranga Bhatta of the Business Ethics and Communication Group- looking for answers for today's challenges in traditional Indian values. His paper, “Using Indigenous Knowledge in Management Education: Indian Experiments” is being slated for publication in the US-based Journal of Management Education.

     So, as you can see, the research pickings at IIM Calcutta have been pretty good this year. Encouraged by this we are stepping up the budget for research funded from the Institute's own resources. The results I have described so far came out of a regime which had a budget of Rs 10 lacs a year; this year onwards we have budgeted Rs 2 crores per year.

     In addition to this,  we have budgeted for each faculty member to go to 3 international conferences in a block of 3 years as compared to just once every three years previously.  This is because we understand that world class research operates as part of a world-wide network of ideas and people. It is important that our faculty interact frequently with their international intellectual peers.  

     I, for one, can't wait to see all the wonderful and original ideas that will flow during this year and which will be my privilege to report at next year's Convocation.
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