The papers published in this issue cover topics such as dynamics of role stress in BPO industry, investor profiling and investment planning, the relationship between working capital and profitability, customer satisfaction and loyalty in the Indian retail supermarkets, and understanding the aspirations of prospective employees.

BPO industry is riddled with inherent problems that result in stressful working. Avinash Kumar Srivastav, in the research paper "Dynamics of Role Stress in BPO Industry", focuses on understanding how role stress operates in BPO industry. According to the author, role stagnation is the most prominent role stressor, and an exploratory factor analysis of 10 role stressors revealed three meta role stressors prominently operating in the BPO companies under study: role distance, work life imbalance and role inadequacy. The paper discusses these combinations of role stressors and shows how they reflect the most important problems and concerns in BPO industry.

Risk tolerance, a person's attitude towards accepting risk, is an important concept that has implications for both financial service providers and consumers. Saptarshi Purkayastha, in the research paper, "Investor Profiling and Investment Planning: An Empirical Study", attempts to characterize and profile the individual investor in order to determine whether the variables—age, occupation, designation, income and dependants—impact the risk appetite of an investor. Based on the analysis of the data collected from the clients of an international bank operating in India, the author concludes that age, salary and designation do impact the risk appetite of an investor. The findings of the study also provide a few suggestions for purveyors of financial services to be selective in their approach to various groups of individual investors.

Working capital is essential for the day-to-day operations of a business, and hence it is the life-blood of any business. Inadequacy of working capital may lead a firm to insolvency, whereas excessive working capital implies idle funds which earn no profits. Therefore, efficient management of working capital is an integral part of the overall corporate strategy to improve corporate profitability. But in reality, controversy persists over the issue whether the working capital of a firm affects its profitability or not. Empirical studies that have been conducted in India also came up with contradictory results. Besides this, there are many intricacies in examining the influence of working capital on profitability. Kaushik Chakraborty, in the research paper, "Working Capital and Profitability: An Empirical Analysis of Their Relationship with Reference to Selected Companies in the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry", evaluates the relationship between working capital and profitability of 25 selected companies in the Indian pharmaceutical industry during the period 1996-97 to 2007-08.

A number of research studies have been conducted in the field of retail services in different countries in order to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty, but all these studies mainly focus either on service quality or service features. Such a study, however, is of immense importance to one of the fastest growing retail markets like India, where the impact of service quality and features on customer satisfaction and loyalty from the retail users' point of view is a very crucial field of discussion. After extracting different variables of service quality and features from studying a body of literature on services like retail, banking, fast foods, etc., done in similar context of exploring drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty, the paper, "Drivers of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty in Indian Retail Supermarkets: An Exploratory Study", by Shirshendu Ganguli and B Vinoth Kumar, attempts to find out the underlying constructs (using factor analysis) of these service variables for the Indian retail supermarket customers. The paper also attempts to explore the impact of these factors on customer satisfaction and loyalty as dependent variables, and the effect of satisfaction on loyalty.

The increasing influence of capitalism as the dominant means of organizing economic activity across the globe has also deeply affected the socioeconomic environment in India. As a consequence, it is felt that this might affect the aspirations of people. Vivekanand and Sunil Pevekar, in the research paper, "Understanding the Aspirations of Prospective Employees", examine the aspirations of the prospective employees by conducting a survey using the aspiration index on postgraduate management students across three B-schools in Bangalore. The aspiration index captures seven different types of aspirations, which can largely be classified as intrinsic or extrinsic aspirations. The data was analyzed with the objective of identifying the importance of different aspirations and examining statistically significant differences based on various demographic variables, such as gender, annual family income and family structure.

- T R K Rao
Consulting Editor