Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers

In this feature a caselet with rich policy implications is presented to a panel of academics and practitioners. The panelists-diagnose the problem or problems, analyse their causes, and make policy-level recommendations that go beyond the immediate situation presented in the case.

Readers are requested to send interesting caselets for possible use by Vikalpa. Kindly send three copies to the Editor, Vikalpa.

“The whole in a nutshell!” that is Frontiers of management research abroad. To expose Indian readers to management research abroad we present in this feature jargon-free summaries of recent research published in some of the world's leading management journals. These capsule summaries would, we hope, lead the enthusiastic readers to still wider reading. And also to contribute to this feature themselves.

Readers are requested to send condensed articles and their publication details to Professor Samir Barua.

The business environment is changing in a way that requires managers to engage in significantly more human resource planning. Human resource planning can lead to improvements in productivity when it is supported by efforts to clarify job roles, to provide training and development for workers, and to engage in comprehensive performance appraisals. The paper develops guidelines for making human resource planning more effective.

Based on data from 90 professionally qualified and 79 nonprofessionally qualified managers in 9 cooperatives, professionals were found to have weaker organizational commitment (OC) than did nonprofessionals. Though the overall satisfaction levels were the same for the two groups, salient and nonsalient expectations satisfaction were found to explain OC of professionals while only nonsalient expectations satisfaction explained OC significantly in nonprofessionals. Implications for decision makers in cooperatives are drawn from these and other additional findings.

Farmers' multipurpose cooperative societies (multicoops) have been widely perceived as effective grassroot organizations for making available to farmers a variety of goods and services: credit, inputs, processing, marketing, etc. Despite a favourable state policy, multicoops have seldom lived up to such expectations. This paper examines the activities of multicoops and their special features in order to understand causes of their failure and explore means of averting such failure. This paper uses the strategic management framework to understand the tasks, structures, and relationships with the environment.

The purpose of these abstracts is to provide reference facilities in the management field. These abstracts have been sponsored by the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

These abstracts cover books and articles on empirical studies, experiences of people involved in the management process, and concepts and theories based on Indian data and environment written by Indian or foreign authors and published in India or abroad.

The following areas of management are covered:

Financial Management, Management Accounting, and Control (FM)

Abstracts of publications between 1970 and 1973 have been published in two volumes by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. For further details please write to Professor Shekhar Chaudhuri.

For reprint of articles abstracted in Vikalpa please contact the original journals.

Innovative management features brief accounts of novel off-beat management. These are accounts of creatively managed organizations or of innovative handling of management issues. As for the others, we invite contributions and comments from readers for this feature too.