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Supplier selection is the process by which firms identify, evaluate and contract with suppliers. The supplier selection process deploys a tremendous amount of a firm's operational and financial resources and is considered as an important determinant of the success of its supply chain. In spite of being strategically important to organizations, the decision for supplier selection is often complex and unstructured. Furthermore, it is inherently a multi-criterion decision-making (MCDM) problem, which pertains to structuring and solving decision problems involving multiple criteria. The paper provides a framework to analyze and evaluate supplier selection in Indian pharmaceutical sector (IPS) using MCDM technique of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. It intends to improve managerial decision-making in the IPS in developing a supplier selection strategy based on multi-criteria evaluation technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulnerability is a pivotal concept for understanding transnational commercial surrogacy and the ethics of reproductive travel. While implicitly recognizing vulnerability as important, existing scholarship falls short of understanding the dynamism of vulnerability. Placing our empirical analysis in conjunction with the rich theoretical literature on this concept, we explore vulnerability in surrogacy arrangements in India as a "mode of openness," defined by its multilayeredness and context specificity. We focus on two retellings of vulnerability. In the first narrative, we analyse the journey of an intended parent who becomes an agent, while in the second narrative, we focus on the trajectory of a surrogate and egg donor becoming an agent. In both narratives, the layers of vulnerability across different interconnected circuits of reproduction—of intended parent, agent, and surrogate—are explicated. Our analysis illustrates the complex and conflicting meanings of vulnerability and illustrates vulnerability as an instigator of agency and resistance; how it can propel upward social mobility and animate attempts to transform an unjust system, but also how such individual agency and empowerment may serve to uphold exploitative relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on institutional theory and entrepreneurial cognition, we test the environmental perception-scanning framework in the United States and India. The results suggest that culture and transition context help explain scanning frequency, but entrepreneurs in the two countries are similar in their perceptions of strategic uncertainty in environmental sectors. Moreover, the perceptions of increased environmental change and sector importance, as conditioned by perceived information accessibility, are associated with increased scanning. Overall, our results provide important indications about perceptions and information seeking, and lend support to indications of a universal mindset of entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies and explains the ways in which firms involved in the debate about the role of biotechnology in Indian agriculture have sought to advance their interests. It argues that the public positions of larger biotech and agro-chemical companies, seed enterprises, and newer start-up firms and the associations to which they belong relate to the differences in their underlying corporate strategies. The extent to which these firms are involved in primary research, export their products, or require protection for their products helps to determine their political affiliations to the leading industry bodies that are active on biotechnology issues. In turn, each of these associations has been shown to have distinct patterns of interaction with particular government agencies involved in the regulation of biotechnology products, as well as differing degrees of contact with global industry coalitions. Through a combination of material influences, in most cases high levels of institutional access, and in a context in which claims about the benefits of biotechnology are echoed and repeated in influential media, industry has played an important role in the evolving regulatory regime. These forms of leverage apply to some firms more than others and smaller actors in the vast seed sector in India are barely involved directly in the current debate about India's "gene revolution." Currently, the policy agenda in Delhi appears to be far more influenced by a fairly close-knit policy network of biotech entrepreneurs from larger multinationals and successful start-up firms with good national and global connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]