Thomas Kocherry : a powerful voice for fishworkers

A priest whose commitment to justice was a way of living his faith and working hard for the betterment of fishworkers, Thomas Kocherry was a firebrand among social workers on Kerala’s coast for over three decades. His talent lay in translating ideas into a language that could inspire and mobilise, and move people to action. Rightly known for his courage and compassion, Tom, as he was popularly known, left behind a void that is not easy to fill

The Renewal Workshop: Consumer Considerations in a Global Supply Chain

In responding to the international need for a circular economy, The Renewal Workshop (TRW) expanded its operations by opening a second factory in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2019. Much of the success of TRW, since its inception in Oregon in 2016, was due to its innovation in supply chain process. TRW incorporated novel solutions of renewing damaged apparel and upcycling overstock products, and consulted brands on ways to design for deconstruction. As the effectiveness of TRW becomes evident and demand grows internationally, it is facing some unexpected challenges. Students will need to reconsider positioning and communication strategy of The Renewal Workshop and decide how to move forward in communicating value to the consumer. Additionally, questions for teaching the case in the classroom are included

The color of support: The effect of sponsor–team visual congruence on sponsorship performance

© American Marketing Association 2019. Brand sponsorship connects brands with large, passionate audiences. The sponsorship literature emphasizes the importance of brand sponsor–team congruence; however, prior research has largely focused on the relevance of the brand to the sport or geographic area. This article offers the first real-world empirical investigation of the effects of visual congruence through color matching on sponsorship performance. A wide-scale study of 703 Major League Baseball fans’ evaluations of their team’s sponsors, merged with real stadium signage data, offers evidence of the benefits of visual congruence. Two experiments in the contexts of product packaging and online advertising provide converging evidence of the positive effects of created visual congruence on attitudes toward the sponsorship, brand attitudes, and intentions. Brands without an inherent match to a team can enjoy enhanced sponsorship benefits with little additional costs simply by adopting the team’s colors in visual displays. However, the viewer’s motivation (fan status), opportunity (fan exposure), and ability (lack of color blindness) to process visual congruence moderates its effectiveness. By using the proposed framework, managers can maximize the value of their sponsorship rights

More Homology Flows

Flows and cuts have been the topic of much study since Ford and Fulkerson's original paper. The problem we look at is the computation of flows on some generalizations of planar graphs. In particular, the input graph can be embedded on a surface of genus g, and has the source and sink on the same face. We show this problem can be reduced to a convex programming problem in dimension 2g, and also show some interesting properties of the feasible polytope.unpublishednot peer reviewe

From Regulation to Management and Back Again: Exploring Governance Shifts in India′s Coastal Zone

Recent struggles over coastal zone policy in India make it a fertile site within which to map the actors, institutions, and knowledges involved in contemporary ecological governance. In 2007, the government drafted a coastal zone policy that marked a shift from the previous regulation approach based on hard boundaries and prohibitions, to a management framework using Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) studies and new scientific technologies to draw up flexible localised plans. The new policy suffered a reversal, however, when a concerted civil society campaign of opposition forced its withdrawal and a return to the earlier regulatory approach, albeit with numerous modifications. This paper argues that the power of the campaign was not just political, but also informational. It traces the multiple and intersecting trajectories through which knowledges are developed, transmitted, and employed. In particular, what emerges is the role of an important ′straddling′ or ′interface′ layer of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and technical ′experts,′ and the role of new information technologies and technologies of governance in enabling a cross-cutting circulation of knowledges. Interests, actors, and knowledges/technologies do not always map neatly on to each other, challenging binaries such as ′traditional′ and ′modern,′ or ′local′ and ′global,′ and rendering unpredictable the outcome of contestations over policy and governance

Capitalist Transformation and the Evolution of Civil Society in a South Indian Fishery

This thesis employs Karl Polanyi’s concept of the double-movement of capitalism to trace the trajectory of a social movement that arose in response to capitalist transformation in the fishery of Kanyakumari district, south India. Beginning in the 1980s, this counter-movement militantly asserted community control over marine resources, arguing that intensified production for new markets should be subordinated to the social imperatives of subsistence and equity. Two decades later, the ambition of “embedding” the market within the community had yielded instead to an adaptation to the market in the language of “professionalization,” self-help, and caste uplift. Polanyi is useful for identifying the constituency for a counter-movement against the market, but tells us little about the social or political complexities of constructing such a movement. To locate the reasons for the decline of the counter-movement in Kanyakumari, I turn therefore to an empirical observation of the civil society within which the counter-movement arose. In doing this, I argue against Partha Chatterjee’s influential view that civil society as a conceptual category does not apply to “popular politics in most of the world,” and is not useful for tracing non-European, post-colonial, and subaltern modernities. By contrast, my case shows the presence of civil society – as a sphere of autonomous and routinized association and publicity – among subaltern groups in rural India. I argue that it is precisely by locating the counter-movement of fishworkers within civil society that one can map the multiple negotiations that take place as subaltern classes are integrated into the market, and into liberal democracy, and explain the difficulties of extending and sustaining the counter-movement itself.Ph

Thomas Kocherry : a powerful voice for fishworkers

A priest whose commitment to justice was a way of living his faith and working hard for the betterment of fishworkers, Thomas Kocherry was a firebrand among social workers on Kerala’s coast for over three decades. His talent lay in translating ideas into a language that could inspire and mobilise, and move people to action. Rightly known for his courage and compassion, Tom, as he was popularly known, left behind a void that is not easy to fill

The state and labour : party regimes and state-labour relationships in three Indian states

The role of the political party in power in mediating the relationship between the state and labour was examined. The Indian states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal--each governed by a political party representing a different ideology and class coalition--were compared in terms of conditions for workers. Other factors likely to affect the position of workers in the state, such as its industrial profile, and the strength of its labour movement prior to the period under study, were also considered.It was found that, although the nature of the party regime did significantly influence the state-labour relationship, workers were not necessarily better off under the most sympathetic and interventionist party. The nature of industry in the state was central in determining conditions for workers. Thus, the party in power influenced conditions for workers as much through policies not aimed specifically at workers, as through intervention in industrial relations

Not too ugly to be tasty: Guiding consumer food inferences for the greater good

The issue of food waste is an important societal challenge with a significant environmental impact. An important issue contributing to food waste is consumers’ unwillingness to purchase suboptimal food. Past literature has shown that people prefer perfectly formed food to abnormally shaped food when given a choice, but much of the mechanism underlying this preference is not well documented. Using a framework based on the halo effect, the authors focus on consumers affective and cognitive responses that cause them to shy away from produce that does not meet the usual aesthetic criteria. Results demonstrate that consumers find well-formed produce vs. deformed produce to be more aesthetically pleasing (beautiful) and that this positive affective reaction leads to more positive consumer inferences of taste, health, and quality. Results also indicate that consumers view sellers of well-formed produce to be more competent than sellers of deformed produce and that this perception is driven by perceptions of beauty and consumer inferences of taste, health, and quality. Lastly, results show that the effects of form on consumer inferences may depend on different distribution channels. Shopping at a farmers market mitigates the impact of the deformation on consumer inferences. Given that form and actual taste, health, and quality are not generally correlated, the results indicate that consumers are making inaccurate inferences. Exploring these inferences has the potential to open new avenues to educate consumers