Guest editorial: Digital decade: e-learning, e-business, and e-working

Citation

Mishra, A. (2023), "Guest editorial: Digital decade: e-learning, e-business, and e-working", Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 205-208. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIBR-06-2023-385

This decade, which started with the aftereffects of the pandemic COVID-19, has transformed how work, education and business are conducted. Firms have digitized their work environments (e-working), educational institutions have migrated physical classrooms to digital platforms (e-learning) and business institutions have created digital outreach for their customers and clients (e-business). These three trends are expected to drive the academic and managerial conversations for the next ten years, as evident in recent literature, making the theme of this special issue apt (Adekoya et al., 2022; Ambrosio-Pérez et al., 2023; Dayaram and Burgess, 2021; Donnelly and Johns, 2021; Hamouche and Chabani, 2021; Maatuk et al., 2022; Vyas, 2022).

In recent years, there is an increase in the number of people who desire to work with flexibility because of the emergence of supporting technologies. The nature of e-working has emerged along with concomitant technologies allowing for various models of e-working. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a major change in the characteristics of the work environments across firms. The desire to work more efficiently and safely, combined with advancements in communication technologies, has fueled the fast expansion of remote e-working. Indeed, remote e-working is now the new reality, and this practice will continue long after the epidemic is a distant memory.

Like workplaces, the traditional educational methods were replaced by e-learning when the pandemic appeared, as social gatherings in educational institutions were considered an opportunity for the infection to propagate. E-learning, through the facilitation of communication technologies, is playing a vital role in the evolution of the existing educational setting. Despite the end of the pandemic, many students want to continue studying online. Such online programs and courses allow them to overcome the restriction of travel as well as availability at a specific location, while also proffering economic benefits for the service provider. Finally, most of the traditional businesses ran in the brick-and-mortar format which involved selling goods/services from a fixed location or shipping them to offsite locations through postal/courier services. However, with the advent of facilitating technologies, like artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and the Internet of Things, modern manufacturers are now looking to engage in e-business, which involves running virtual organizations as well as marketing/selling the products and services online powered through digital transactions.

The special issue is an outcome of the 2022 edition of the Conference on Excellence in Research and Education (CERE) organized at the Indian Institute of Management Indore, which explores the research opportunities in the digital decade and the current transition to e-learning, e-business and e-working to understand the transformation from physical to digital presence. Out of more than 300 papers presented at the conference, five papers were selected, after multiple rounds of filtering as well as peer review, for final publication in this special issue.

In the first paper titled “Media synchronicity implications for Indian white-collar employees' work-from-home well-being and preference, mediated by psychological needs satisfaction,” Navya Kumar and Swati Alok explored the impact of ICT media characteristics and usage frequency on the satisfaction of employees’ psychological needs and thereby on employee well-being under work from home (WFH) and the preference for WFH. The ICT media characteristics examined in this work are its ability to support synchronicity or the coordinated behaviors of individuals working together. The psychological needs examined are the need for relatedness or belongingness with others and the need for competence or feeling effective at tasks. For the investigation, primary data were collected from 301 white-collar employees engaged in diverse manufacturing services organizations in India. As part of its novel contributions, this study blended the theories of media synchronicity and self-determination to investigate how inanimate communication media can impact humans' psychological needs, well-being and preferences. The study also created a new extensible media evaluation parameter, which combines the usage frequency of a set of ICT media and their synchronicity-supporting abilities.

In the second paper titled “A successful recipe for localization: a case of GIMP (GNU image manipulation program),” Snehalata Bhikanrao Shirude and Manish Ratnakar Joshi presented an approach used to implement the GIMP software Marathikaran (localization in the Marathi language), as part of a project assigned by Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha of Maharashtra Government (RMVS), India. They presented systematic steps to localize the GIMP software in the Marathi language (from 2% to 100%). This localization project has been described by RMVS as a pilot project that would guide similar localizations in many other Indian languages for other popular open-source software. This translation work shall help overcome the general misconception that regional languages are good only for communication (Boli Bhasha) but cannot be used for the dissemination of knowledge (Gyan Bhasha).

In the third paper titled “Moderated mediation between organizational culture and employee performance: the role of similarities in religious teachings and high-performance managerial practices,” Anant Deogaonkar and Sampada Nanoty, based on the high-performance managerial practices (HPMP) and the similarities in religious teachings (SRT), explained how the organizational culture (OC) influences employee performance (EP). According to their hypothesis, the OC influences EP via a controlled mediation of SRT and HPMP. The hypotheses were supported by examining data collected from 275 employees. Individual employees in diverse private sector organizations from all industry sectors constitute the target audience. The research benefits society by promoting organizational diversity and harmony through SRT. Their results demonstrate that the SRT mediates the association between OC and EP via HPMP. This suggests that managers must investigate treatments based on the SRT to make certain that all employees are treated fairly, ensuring employee well-being and raising retention rates. The report gave managers an initial foundation for analyzing and rethinking employee engagement and satisfaction issues.

In the fourth paper titled “Predictive model for admission uncertainty in high education using Naïve Bayes classifier,” Atul Rawal and Bechoo Lal aimed to identify and analyze the undetected trends in students' academic records and credentials by constructing a predictive model using Naive Bayes classifiers. The primary objective of this investigation is to make it less difficult for applicants to be accepted into colleges and other institutions based on their prior credentials and some additional essential variables. To forecast a student's admittance to higher education institutions, this research study combined Naive Bayes classification with Kernel density estimations. The graduate record examinations (GRE), grade point average (GPA) and university rankings – all requirements for entrance to higher education – were used by the researcher to gather data from the Kaggle data sets. The classification model was experimentally confirmed to have an accurate prediction rate of 72% and is based on the data used for a training set of students' exam scores, including GPA, GRE, RANK and some other crucial criteria. The Shapiro–Wilk normality test and Gaussian distribution were used on enormous amounts of data to increase accuracy.

In the final paper titled “United we stand: the entrepreneurs network and its role in overcoming crisis situations,” Subhalaxmi Mohapatra and Risha Roy aimed to identify and analyze the relationships between the networks of the entrepreneur (with a special focus on the stakeholders) and its effect on a business approach which is based on the philosophy of sustainability, particularly during the time of a pandemic. The study takes a cue from the contextual aspects of how women entrepreneurs build and develop a venture and identifies that women entrepreneurs face common problems and hurdles in their entrepreneurial journey. While developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem through social networks may have its challenges, one of the aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem that has not been widely researched is the social purpose. There might be a need to identify and evaluate how the skills and competencies of entrepreneurs and specifically women entrepreneurs evolve and enhance as they move from idea to business launch to business growth for entrepreneurial growth. There were two specific objectives that the paper addresses: How should the entrepreneurial network affect the business process and lead to positive outcomes for either the entrepreneur or the firm, or both? and In a firm which values sustainability, how do the networks allow firms to grow or sustain the firm during the crisis? For analyzing the same, a case study method approach was used. The study has a theoretical contribution in terms of its additions to the theory of “network success hypotheses of entrepreneurship theory” by suggesting that the manifestation of the same can be faced during a crisis by the entire network of the entrepreneur. The findings also provide insights on how an entrepreneur specifically a small and women entrepreneur can use various innovative ways of rethinking their strategies within the organization during a crisis without compromising on the basic philosophy of the company.

As chair of the organizing committee of the 2022 CERE, it gives me immense pleasure in bringing together this valuable special issue and I hope that future iterations of this or other conferences will take the agenda raised by these papers.