Allegorical Strategy in Pavannan's Short Stories

The allegorical strategies that are prevalent in Pavannan's short stories add strength to short story literature. Short story writers create their work in such a way that the writer catches the heart of the reader. V.V.S Aiyer was the first to praise the art form of short stories and wrote many great works in Tamil. His short stories were compiled under the title Mangaiyarkarasi's Love. Kulathankarai Arasa maram, one of his short stories is still very much famous. Similarly, Pavannan is the best short story writer by taking a good plot and showing the best strategy. Pavannan has followed the method of attracting readers through various strategies. This article categorizes and reveals the multifaceted parables that are interwoven in two short stories of Pavannan, Mudivu and Yaezhu Ilatcham Varigal

Moral Principles in Bama’s Short Story ‘Anthi’

Bama, is a prominent leading author of Dalit literature. Her novel Karuku written in 1992 became famous because of its autobiographical elements. She used the language of Dalit people in her writings and it is considered to have paved a new path. She works as a teacher. Her novel Karuku has been translated into English by Lakshmi Holmstrom. She received the 'Cross Wordbook Award' of the year 2000. Bama, who was born in the sixties in Tamil Nadu is currently working as a teacher. Her novels Karuku (1992) and Sangathi (1994) are two of the best Dalit novels. Karuku (Novel-1992), Sangathi (Novel-1994), Vanmam (Novel-2002), Kisumbukkaran (Short Story- 1996), Manushi (Novel) and Thavutu Kuruvi (2019 short- stories) bear great moral thoughts. A short story called ‘Anthi’ has been taken up for analysis in the short stories of Daututuk Kuvi. In this story Bama highlighted the sufferings of lonely old people. Anthi is a short story that captures the life style of the people living with goats and cows. Bama points dignified lifestyle through the lifestyle of Thavasi grandma. In the short story ‘Anthi’ Bama has created a character Thavasi grandma who want to live her life by herself without depending on others. Morality is of the views regarding how one should behave in society. It can be defined as the set of behaviors accepted by a society regarding what is good and what is bad. Morals are not the same in all societies as can be seen in the short story of Anthi through Thavasi grandma. As the problems are different from time to time, according to the development of the society, the stories are created from a critical point of view. This article is about the life style of Thavasi grandma as mentioned in the story ‘Anthi’ by Bama

Looking beyond impulse buying: A cross-cultural and multi-domain investigation of consumer impulsiveness

Purpose: This paper aims to conceptualize consumer impulsiveness (CI) as a global trait to explore its influence on a wider range of consumer behaviours and also presents a revised CI scale. Prior research on CI focuses on the impulse buying context and does not establish the cross-cultural invariance of the CI scale. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies with undergraduate and MBA students in Singapore, UK and USA were used to develop the revised CI scale and to test its cross-cultural measurement invariance and predictive validity. Findings: CI is a three-dimensional construct with cognitive (imprudence), affective (self-indulgence) and behavioural (lack of self-control) dimensions. However, self-indulgence and lack of self-control positively (do not) correlate for consumers with independent (interdependent) self-concepts. These three dimensions also vary in their influence on different types of self-regulatory failures. Research limitations/implications: The student participants used in all the studies may be relatively younger and better educated compared to average consumers. Hence, there is a need to test the revised CI scale with diverse consumer populations. Practical implications: The revised CI scale would help future researchers study the influence of CI across diverse cultures and self-regulatory failures in a reliable and rigorous manner. Social implications: Our findings may help control the onset and spread of self-regulatory failures among young consumers by early identification of their psychological origins. Originality/value: This paper extends the scope of CI beyond impulse buying to study its impact on self-regulatory failure across five diverse behavioural domains (driving, eating, entertainment, shopping and substance abuse). © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Deliberate Self-Indulgence Versus Involuntary Loss of Self-Control: Toward a Robust Cross-Cultural Consumer Impulsiveness Scale

There is neither a consensus about the dimensionality of the consumer impulsiveness construct nor sufficient evidence about the validity and cross-cultural measurement equivalence of its various scales. We address these gaps by using cross-cultural differences in control orientations as the conceptual foundation for a more robust consumer impulsiveness scale. Specifically, we demonstrate that unlike individualistic consumers, collectivistic consumers distinguish between deliberate self-indulgence and involuntary loss of self-control, as reflected in the three-factor structure (prudence, self-indulgence, and self-control) for the collectivists and a two-factor structure (prudence and hedonism) for the individualists. We also discuss some implications and limitations of this research

Exploring Impulse Buying in Services: Toward an Integrative Framework

Prior research on impulse buying focuses mostly on goods, ignoring its incidence in services despite growing evidence about the prevalence of impulsive behaviors across diverse consumption contexts. This paper introduces an integrative conceptual framework to study impulse buying in both goods and services by using perceived risk as a focal construct in the impulse buying process and reports findings from two empirical studies. The first study uses a mall intercept survey to show that perceived risk is lower and likelihood of impulse buying is greater for services with higher tangible (vs. intangible) attributes and higher search (vs. experience and credence) properties. The second study uses a lab-experiment to show significant differences in the influence of three relevant consumer traits (consumer impulsiveness, optimum stimulation level, and self-monitoring) on the level of perceived risk and impulsiveness in purchase decisions for six different services with varying levels of attributes (tangible vs. intangible) and evaluation properties (search, experience, and credence). Overall, the two studies provide substantial evidence of the presence of impulse buying in services and useful insights for researchers and services marketers

Perirhinal cortex and the recognition of relative familiarity

Spontaneous object recognition (SOR) is a widely used task of recognition memory in rodents which relies on their propensity to explore novel (or relatively novel) objects. Network models typically define perirhinal cortex as a region required for recognition of previously seen objects largely based on findings that lesions or inactivations of this area produce SOR deficits. However, relatively little is understood about the relationship between the activity of cells in the perirhinal cortex that signal novelty and familiarity and the behavioural responses of animals in the SOR task. Previous studies have used objects that are either highly familiar or absolutely novel, but everyday memory is for objects that sit on a spectrum of familiarity which includes objects that have been seen only a few times, or objects that are similar to objects which have been previously experienced. We present two studies that explore cellular activity (through c-fos imaging) within perirhinal cortex of rats performing SOR where the familiarity of objects has been manipulated. Despite robust recognition memory performance, we show no significant changes in perirhinal activity related to the level of familiarity of the objects. Reasons for this lack of familiarity-related modulation in perirhinal cortex activity are discussed. The current findings support emerging evidence that perirhinal responses to novelty are complex and that task demands are critical to the involvement of perirhinal cortex in the control of object recognition memory