The Business Review

School of Business Studies

University of Kashmir

ISSN: 0972-8384

The cricket bat industry of Kashmir assumes the title of being one of the oldest wood based industries of Kashmir. However, the potential that this industry enjoys could not be capitalized fully, for being faced with some serious constraints and challenges and as such this paper aimed to analyze the barriers in the path of growth and development of this industry and suggest measures, as how to overcome them. The study has been conducted on a sample of 55 cricket bat manufacturing units of Kashmir. The analysis of the primary data has been done with the help of mean scores to assess the severity of these barriers and factor analysis to group them. The study has identified six barriers with the help of relevant tools and techniques namely Infrastructural and Administrative, Financial, Technological, Raw Material, Market and Production Constraints.

Tourism plays a vital role in the economy of the valley and has direct as well as an indirect impact. Despite the challenges of the conflict situation, some tour operators persisted in the region over time, with some degree of success as well. The question is, how are these entrepreneurs adjusting their behaviour to deal with the challenging conflict environment that shapes their context? What helps them cope with the conflict environment? The study is qualitative in nature and is carried out through semi-structured interviews. All the respondents in the study have persevered through the conflictual environment with businesses intact some in profit others just surviving. The respondents were influenced by complex interactions of many factors, including family, business background and the composition of their networks, as well as their interactions with the current regime. The contribution of this research is twofold. First, the article provides difficult to access empirical evidence on entrepreneurial behaviour in a conflict environment. The second contribution is to the theory on institutional understandings of entrepreneurship in context, extending the existing literature to include conflict.

Rapid urbanization and modernization have created rapid changes in the socio-cultural set-up of typical Indian families. Paid occupations are no longer the forte of men only. Increase participation in labour by women are creating a paradigm shift and forcing organizations to revisit their work policies. This has opened new avenues of aspirations and personal growth for working women. There is a sea change in a woman’s exposure to educational opportunities than it was decades ago. However, a woman has not been completely relieved of the responsibilities towards children, aging family members and other demands of a household. As a result, working women feel over worked most of the time resulting in poor Work-Life Balance (WLB). Besides being a challenging issue for leaders, managers and policy makers; WLB has also attracted researchers. The demands of a woman’s life are often multi-faceted. WLB primarily examines her ability to ‘fit’ between the multiple roles she keeps playing. In the light of this, the study aims at analysing the WLB of working women working in higher education institutes of J&K.

Saving for retirement is among the complex decisions that a household encounters inlifetime. The importance of planning and saving for old age is so essential that the government of various nations across the globe have introduced special employee financial planning programmes, social security benefits and have also provided various tax benefits for encouragingretirement savings. All of this is putting a great pressure on economic conditions of a country. Despite the measures undertaken, individuals have failed to save enough for their retirement. Since changes in economic conditions affect everyone in an economy. However individuals get affected differently depending upon the level of planning undertaken and the resources that have been earmarked for uncertain times. As government is bringing the onus of retirement planning to individuals by shifting from defined benefit to defined contribution plan of savings for retirement, the need for planning for the old age has intensified. The article throws light on how individuals get affected by factors which apparently are not related to savings decision. The article also documents how the retirement savings decision is affected by financial knowledge and identifies gaps for future research. The findings from this paper shall have implications for policy makers, financial institutions such as pension agencies, employers, and personal financial consultants for developing various mechanisms that will help in saving for old age.

It has been widely recognized that tourism development is a double-edged sword for host communities. Not only does it generate benefits, but it also generates costs. Depending on the amount of benefits and costs that residents receive from tourism, they have different perception towards tourism’s development and its impacts upon their communities. In other words, when residents perceive the positive impacts of tourism, they are willing to support additional tourism development and vice versa. Consequently, residents are key actors in planning for tourism development and without them; negative economic, social, cultural and environmental consequences for local communities would likely be greater. Research has evidenced that these negative influences of tourism on residents can reduce the attractiveness of a destination which can adversely affect the income potential and employment opportunities for the local tourism industry. Therefore, in order to develop sustainable tourism community, support and thorough knowledge of how residents’ formulate their perceptions toward tourism development and its impacts is crucial. In view of this well-known belief, an attempt has been made in the present study to review the extant literature available on the residents’ perception towards tourism development and its impacts. Further, on the basis of existing literature available on the subject, various research gaps have been identified for future research.

The work environment is an important area of management research, which plays an important role for the employees in the organisation to determine the working condition. Work environment affects the employee morale, productivity and engagement - both positively and negatively. The employees working in the poor work environment are prone to stress, which reduces employee’s performance. Hence, performance is affected badly due to the work environment. Establishing a better work environment is essential, in which the employees are productive in raising the profits for the organisation, corporation as well as small business. The present study is to determine the impact of work environment on the performance of the employees. The paper also highlights some of the key elements of work environment and their relative impact on the employee performance. It is the responsibility of the management to understand and recognize changing work preferences of employees and address them cordially in order to retain and develop them properly. So, the organizations must build up such work environments that are conducive and should meet the dynamic need of the employees. It will help the organization in reducing job dissatisfaction, employee’s turnover and absenteeism, and will increase their performance.

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have achieved a greater role in Indian capital market during last one and a half decade. They have shown a good relation with various benchmarks especially BSE Sensex in terms of price fluctuations. In this context, the present paper examines the trend and pattern of FIIs from 2000-2016 towards Indian capital market. The period 2000-2016 has been purposely chosen as FIIs investment started soaring in from the millennium year and 17 year study captures the recession phase of 2009-2013. It was found that FIIs have always shown a positive trend towards India except few years like 2008, 2015, and 2016. The scholar also attempted to examine the correlation between FII investment and Sensex volatility during this period by Karl Pearson’s correlation test. The test has shown positive correlation.

In the present study, an attempt has been made to study the perception of teaching staff towards QWL on the basis of demographics namely gender, age and experience. The respondents of the study comprise of 156 faculty members selected from five colleges in Srinagar district. The data whatsoever collected was analyzed using SPSS 20 Version. The findings of the study revealed that gender has no significant effect towards QWL. However, it was found from the findings that experience and age influences the perception of teaching personnel towards QWL. The study suggests that QWL needs to be further enriched in order to improve the performance of teaching personnel in sample study institutions.

This book is collection of several articles written by authors who are professional in data mining and have conducted extensive research in their areas of specialization using R which is one of the mostly widely used data mining tool in business applications among several other open source software. It is not easy for beginners to find appropriate packages to use for their data mining tasks. It is difficult for experienced users to well in a way to find most optimum packages to solve their business problems and the best way to use them in data mining process of their applications. This book aims to facilitate using R in data mining applications by presenting real world applications in various domains. The book consist of 12 chapters and the review is given below: