Monica and Manoj, founders of Craftsvilla.com, once had an opportunity to interact with rural artisans and designers, in her road trip to Kutch. While interacting, they realized that the middlemen involved in this unorganized retail business were paid very less for the products. The single reason for this disparity they found was the process of taking the art form to retail stores (middleman involved). Most of the artisans, because of no return from the business, want to disengage their future generations to learn the art. The reasons for the extinct includes illiteracy, inability to reach the customers, lack of awareness to understand customer needs and customization, better bargaining power of the middlemen, lack of awareness about the government support programs, lack of mentors to guide them, poverty, and so on. With the passion for Indian culture and the urge to benefit the artisan-producers, they decided to work on an e-commerce business model, craftsvilla.com, a $200million start-up. The idea was to create a platform where the artisans could directly connect with consumers and earn a good livelihood. The present case study on Craftsvilla. Com is built under the context to explore the concept of co-creation in e-commerce industry and the business opportunities for Craftsvilla through co-creation. The data for the case study was collected over a period of 10 months, starting from October 2015 to August 2016.Data collection primarily was through regular interaction with the founders, artisans, employees, and customers of Craftsvilla. Learning from the case will help to identify various methodologies to adopts cocreation opportunities by engaging stakeholders.

PurposeThe COVID-19 crisis has affected almost all the global sectors. The hotel industry, however, was hit hardest challenging the leadership. This study, therefore, attempts to explore the challenges hospitality leadership in India face to navigate the crisis. The study additionally addresses how leaders manage the expectations of key stakeholders; communicate hard decisions with employees, pursue strategies for revival and explores the role of technology to survive the crisis.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts a qualitative approach involving structured interviews with 16 senior hospitality leaders consisting of CEO, vice president, general managers, directors, entrepreneur and general managers from various organisations like hotels, restaurant chains, food services and facilities management services. Data were content analysed involving coding techniques.FindingsThe leadership challenges included making customers and employees feel safe, optimising operations, agility and resilience of leaders, maintaining a balance between stakeholders, managing employee stress and ensuring cash reserves. The study found that leaders manage the expectation of various stakeholders by maintaining balance, demonstrating empathy and agility. The hard decisions are communicated with the employees through involvement, empathy and alleviating stress.Research limitations/implicationsThe study contributes by identifying twelve themes from the participants' responses under five major themes-labelled as leadership challenges, managing stakeholders, communicating with the employees, the role of technology and best practices of surviving the crisis. Future research can be conducted on such sub-themes in different countries.Practical implicationsAs the tourism industry in India is recovering after the second wave, the governments along with all stakeholders, must launch special events for promoting the tourism sector. Safety measures like making vaccination certificates for all tourists and employees of the tourism sector should be made mandatory. Further, special certification following the COVID-19 protocol needs to be introduced for hotels and catering establishments. A fund generated from the sector's direct tax contribution needs to be established to support the employees.Social implicationsThe study has several social implications. The study results can unite all industry stakeholders to shape the post-pandemic era through collaboration. Empathetic leadership can take the industry out of chaos by balancing the interests of the various stakeholders of society. The pandemic has proven that we all are vulnerable to risks and challenges; leaders have a vital role in taking proactive steps to ensure that such uncertainties do not cause unprecedented damage.Originality/valueThis study expanded the research on the hospitality leadership challenges in managing crises in the backdrop of the crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic. The conceptual model, variables, themes and sub-themes utilised are original contributions to the hospitality literature.

Technology adoption for school education further gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the challenges and strategies of children belonging to the less privileged (we use ‘privileged’ in the article to identify those enjoying a standard of living or rights as majority of people in the society) families are different from those of the children who come from socio-economically better-off (privileged) backgrounds. The purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of children with school education and using technology for learning. Past studies have highlighted the use of internet and communication technologies as a promising solution to provide quality school education in the remotest parts of the country. Previous research has also ascertained that the socio-economic status divide has no significant impact on the students’ ability to learn using technology. Children can use technology to learn irrespective of their socio-economic status and background. We conducted this exploratory qualitative study from a constructivist grounded theory perspective. A purposive sample of 14 students (9 from underprivileged and 5 from privileged family backgrounds) in the age group of 6–14 years, was used and unstructured interviews were conducted. We analysed the data using constructivist grounded theory methodology. We found that the experiences of privileged and underprivileged children differed with respect to access to internet, affordability of ICT device, quality teachers, parental support, and financial sponsorship. However, the experiences and perspectives of the children were found to be similar with respect to personal ownership of mobile phone device for unlimited time at own disposal, self-directed learning and having a trusted study advisor. The findings may be useful to policy makers and EdTech firms to build strategies and solutions for effective implementation of universal school education in the country.

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic pushed organizations across the world to suddenly adopt work from home at a mass scale to maintain business continuity. This study aims to investigate the influence of lack of social interaction in work from the home arrangement on employee work effectiveness.Design/methodology/approachThe data were analysed using the partial least square (PLS) structural equation modelling (SEM) approach, a nonparametric method based on total variance, through SmartPLS software 3.0. The data were collected from 399 participants in India using the snowball sampling technique. The target populations were the people who were working from home due to the pandemic and by asking them to forward the survey link in their network.FindingsThe results suggest that social interaction has a significant positive impact on work effectiveness. However, this impact is not affected by the employee's perceived benefits of maintaining social distancing during the pandemic. The study also found that social interaction is important for both genders and found no significant difference in the relationship between social interaction and work from home effectiveness for male and female employees.Practical implicationsThis study will be useful for human resource practitioners and managers as they build strategies to adopt work from home as a regular practice even in non-pandemic situations.Originality/valueThis study is the first to examine the influence of lack of social interaction on the work from home effectiveness during the COVID-19 times. It examines the moderating role of the perceived benefits of maintaining social distancing and gender on the effect of lack of social interaction as a barrier to work from home effectiveness.

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