Editorial

I am happy to bring you the 'monsoon' issue of the year with its complement of articles and features. In our first article of the issue, 'From wrongdoing to imprisonment: Test of a causal-moral model', Prof Ramadhar Singh and co-authors start with the intuitive desire of people that wrongdoers be punished. They test a causal-moral model of punishment postulating that causal attribution and moral responsibility are distinct precursors of punishment and that they are sequentially dependent. The independent variables of culture, circumstance of wrongdoing and severity of outcome impact punishment differently and they should also be treated as distinct constructs. New perspectives on why actions construed right in one culture may be considered wrong in another, and on whistle blowing, emerge from the findings.

The assessment of fraud risk and evaluation of controls designed to prevent or detect fraud in organisations are emerging as a requirement and key concern for all managements. In their article, 'Determining expected behaviour of fraudsters for a continuous audit system', Profs Mathew A Thomas and Rahul R Marathe attempt to determine the behaviour of potential fraudsters in a continuous audit system where the fraudsters have multiple options to commit fraud. The system is modelled as a Continuous Time Markov Chain where the state changes are caused by the fraudster's actions. Their paper has three limitations e first, the game model uses a zero sum game, second, that the payoffs are known and certain and third, that the audit system's choices are either detect the fraud or fail to detect the fraud.

In the changing competitive scenario in the Indian retail industry, business insights from customer knowledge management can be a rich source of competitive advantage. In arriving at his 'Framework for managing customer knowledge in retail industry', Prof Sourav Mukherji identifies three sources of customer knowledge viz, customer transactions, customer interactions and customer communities of practice and talks about critical issues pertaining to the customer knowledge management system that are relevant to the retail industry. The author uses the knowledge intensive industries such as management consulting and software development to draw lessons for the retail industry. He finally arrives at a decision-making model that would enable retailers to leverage customer knowledge for both productivity benefits and product innovation.

In this issue, in the Interview feature, Prof Vivek Moorthy speaks to Dr Duvvuri Subbarao, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India's apex bank, against the background of India's current economy and tries to assess the RBI policies and seek clarifications regarding positions taken by RBI that are for high or immediate policy relevance. In the Round Table feature on the state of management research in India, five academics of repute, Profs Naresh Khatri, Abhoy K Ojha, Pawan Budhwar, Vasanthi Srinivasan and Arup Varma, debate on the relevance and rigour of current Indian management research. The questions they ask include whether Indian management research should follow the American model; whether indigenous 'Indian' theories or bodies of knowledge will emerge, and how to build a critical mass of management scholarship about India and establish publications for disseminating such scholarship. They also consider the potential of fora such as the Indian Academy of Management in contributing to such an effort.

Among the announcements in this issue is one inviting submissions from doctoral students to our annual IMR Doctoral Conference to be held in December 2012, the fourth in our successful series of doctoral conferences. I also look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Nagasimha Balakrishna Kanagal, 
Editor-in-Chief
IIMB Management Review, India
Email: eic@iimb.ernet.in