Management and Labour Studies
Management and Labour Studies (MLS) is the official publication of XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, Jamshedpur, published in collaboration with SAGE Publications.
XLRI, the oldest B-school in India, was founded in 1949 by a few visionary Jesuit Fathers to bring a change in the economy and society at large. The institute always strives to be a management school with a difference. XLRI has always had and maintains a global outlook. We were the first among management schools in India to internationalise our academic programmes. Renowned personalities, distinguished industrialists, academicians and stewards of Jamshedpur Jesuit Society have been part of the institute as Board of Governors, leaders and administrators, teachers and guides. True to its vision, XLRI strives to offer an education which just does not culminate in a degree, but also inspires future business leaders to respond to the unmet needs of the society. It is ranked among top 5 of the India’s best business schools by Business Today. It has also been ranked 84th in the world by CEOWorld Magazine.
In line with its mission of disseminating research and extending the frontiers of knowledge, MLS?a quarterly peer-reviewed journal?was started in 1975. It has since been catering to scholars in the area of business management and related fields of social sciences.
Initially internally published, it is now a part of SAGE Journals, one of the world’s leading independent academic publisher.
The journal’s editorial team comprises distinguished professors from well-known institutions?both from India and all over the world. The team is diverse and comprises members from all areas of management.
MLS receives articles from scholars across India and is looked up to as one of the top journals to be published as it gives the authors high visibility with its multidisciplinary audience. Studies and papers written by scholars in the field of business and personnel management and industrial and corporate law, economics, etc. are published in the journal.
A high standard of academic rigour is maintained through a rigorous peer review process. Addressed to professional managers and academicians, this quarterly refereed journal focuses on the latest thinking and research in the areas of management, labour and related subjects.
The journal publishes articles on a range of areas in management and related areas of social sciences, including primarily psychology, economics, history, international relations, media and mass communication and sociology, and secondarily, language and linguistics, geography, demographics and politics. It aims to provide a forum for discussion on the salient features relating to the whole field of management.
The journal follows a rigorous double-blind review policy.
This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Management and Labour Studies (MLS) is the official publication of XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, Jamshedpur. Addressed to professional managers and academicians, this quarterly refereed journal focuses on the latest thinking and research in the areas of management, labour and related subjects.
This peer-reviewed journal aims to provide a forum for discussion on the salient features relating to the whole field of management. The journal publishes research in the fields of business and human resource management, labour studies and related issues. The journal welcomes research conducted in the Indian and international context. Though the journal mostly publishes empirical work, it is also open to good quality conceptual research.
The journal follows a rigorous double-blind review policy.
| Trilochan Tripathy | Professor of Finance, XLRI, Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur |
| J.Vinanchi Arachi | UNIDO, Vienna, Austria |
| G Balasubramanyam | Institute for Financial Management and Research, Chennai, India |
| Greg Bamber | Monash University, Melbourne, Australia |
| Gloryson R B Chalil | XLRI Jamshedpur, India |
| Robert Chia | Adam Smith Business School, Glasgow, Scotland |
| Gerard Farias | Silberman College of Business, Fairleigh Dickinson University. New Jersey, USA |
| Diptesh Ghosh | Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India |
| Anthony Halog | Faculty of Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia |
| D Israel | XLRI, Jamshedpur, India |
| Mithileshwar Jha | Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India |
| Jerome Joseph | Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India |
| Sanal Kumar Velayudhan | Adjunct Faculty of Marketing, IIM Nagpur |
| B K Mangaraj | XLRI Jamshedpur, India |
| Timothy Marjoribanks | Swinburne University, Australia |
| Pitabas Mohanty | XLRI Jamshedpur, India |
| R P Mohanty | Vice Chancellor, SOA University, Bhubaneswar, India |
| Gillian Sullivan Mort | Director, Yunus Social Business Centre, La Trobe Business School, Melbourne, Australia |
| Rajas Parchure | Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics, Pune, India |
| H K Pradhan | XLRI, Jamshedpur, India |
| Akshay R Rao | University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA |
| Hayagreeva Rao | Stanford University, USA |
| Ashok K Roy | University System of Alaska, USA |
| Santanu Sarkar | XLRI, Jamshedpur, India |
| E S Srinivas | Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India |
| Anil Verma | Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada |
| Neharika Vohra | Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India |
| Anjali Kispotta | Senior Editorial Co-ordinator |
Management and Labour Studies
This Journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics
Management and Labour Studies is hosted on Sage Peer Review, a web-based online submission and peer review system. Please read the Manuscript Submission Guidelines below, and then visit https://peerreview.sagepub.com/mls to login and submit your article online. Remember you can log in to the submission site at any time to check on the progress of your paper through the peer review process.
Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Management and Labour Studies will be reviewed.
There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this Journal. Open Access options are available - see section 3.3 below.
As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere. Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that Management and Labour Studies will consider submissions of papers that have been posted on preprint servers; please alert the Editorial Office when submitting (contact details are at the end of these guidelines) and include the DOI for the preprint in the designated field in the manuscript submission system. Authors should not post an updated version of their paper on the preprint server while it is being peer reviewed for possible publication in the Journal. If the article is accepted for publication, the author may re-use their work according to the Journal's author archiving policy.
If your paper is accepted, you must include a link on your preprint to the final version of your paper.
If you have any questions about publishing with Sage, please visit the Sage Journal Solutions Portal
1.1 Aims & Scope
1.2 Article types
1.3 Writing your paper
2.1 Peer review policy
2.2 Authorship
2.3 Acknowledgements
2.4 Funding
2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests
2.6 Research data
3.1 Publication ethics
3.2 Contributor’s publishing agreement
3.3 Open access and author archiving
4.1 Formatting
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
4.3 Supplemental material
4.4 Reference style
5.1 ORCID
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
5.3 Permissions
6. On acceptance and publication
6.1 Sage Production
6.2 Online First publication
6.3 Access to your published article
6.4 Promoting your article
Before submitting your manuscript to Management and Labour Studies, please ensure you have read the Aims & Scope.
- Research articles
- Book reviews
Articles should be written in MS Word using Times New Roman font. Manuscripts should not exceed 8,000 words and should be submitted in duplicate with the cover page bearing only the title of the article, author/s’ names, designations, official addresses, phone/fax numbers, and email addresses. Author/s’ name should not appear on any other page.
- All articles must be accompanied by an abstract of 150–200 words and 4–6 keywords.
- Use British spellings in all cases rather than American spellings (hence, ‘programme’ not ‘program’, ‘labour’ not ‘labor’, and ‘centre’ and not ‘center’).
- Use ‘z’ spellings instead of ‘s’ spellings. This means that words ending with ‘-ise’, ‘isation’, etc., will be spelt with ‘z’ (e.g., ‘recognize’, ‘organize’, ‘civilize’).
- Use single quotes throughout. Double quotes only to be used within single quotes. Spellings of words in quotations should not be changed. Quotations of 45 words or more should be separated from the text and indented with one space with a line space above and below. Notes should be numbered serially and presented at the end of the article. Notes must contain more than a mere reference.
- Use ‘twentieth century’, ‘1980s’. Spell out numbers from one to nine, 10 and above to remain in figures. However, for exact measurements, use only figures (3 km, 9 per cent, not %). Use thousands and millions, not lakhs and crores.
- Use of italics and diacriticals should be minimised, but used consistently.
- Tables and figures to be indicated by numbers separately (see Table 1), not by placement (see Table below). Present each table and figure on a separate sheet of paper, gathering them together at the end of the article. All Figures and Tables should be cited in the text. Sources for figures and tables should be mentioned irrespective of whether or not they require permissions.
- A consolidated listing of all books, articles, essays, theses and documents referred to (including any referred to in the tables, graphs and maps) should be provided at the end of the article. Guidelines specified in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition) must be followed.
- Use endnotes instead of footnotes. Notes must contain more than a mere reference.
The Sage Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources. Sage Author Services also offers authors a variety of ways to improve and enhance their article including English language editing, plagiarism detection, and video abstract and infographic preparation.
1.3.1 Make your article discoverable
For information and guidance on how to make your article more discoverable, visit our Gateway page on How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online
The journal follows a rigorous double-anonymize review policy. Sage does not permit the use of author-suggested (recommended) reviewers at any stage of the submission process, be that through the web-based submission system or other communication. Reviewers should be experts in their fields and should be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript. Our policy is that reviewers should not be assigned to a paper if:
• The reviewer is based at the same institution as any of the co-authors
• The reviewer is based at the funding body of the paper
• The author has recommended the reviewer
• The reviewer has provided a personal (e.g. Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail) email account and an institutional email account cannot be found after performing a basic Google search (name, department and institution).
All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.
If the named authors for a manuscript change at any point between submission and acceptance, an Authorship Change Form must be completed and digitally signed by all authors (including any added or removed) . An addition of an author is only permitted following feedback raised during peer review. Completed forms can be uploaded at Revision Submission stage or emailed to the Journal Editorial Office contact (listed on the journal’s manuscript submission guidelines). All requests will be moderated by the Editor and/or Sage staff.
Important: Changes to the author by-line by adding or deleting authors are NOT permitted following acceptance of a paper.
Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools.
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.
Please supply any personal acknowledgements separately to the main text to facilitate anonymous peer review.
2.3.1 Writing assistance
Individuals who provided writing assistance, e.g. from a specialist communications company, do not qualify as authors and so should be included in the Acknowledgements section. Authors must disclose any writing assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input – and identify the entity that paid for this assistance. It is not necessary to disclose use of language polishing services.
Management and Labour Studies requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit the Funding Acknowledgements page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests
Management and Labour Studies encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the Sage Journal Author Gateway
The journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. For more information, including FAQs please visit the Sage Research Data policy pages.
Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:
- share your research data in a relevant public data repository
- include a data availability statement linking to your data. If it is not possible to share your data, we encourage you to consider using the statement to explain why it cannot be shared.
- cite this data in your research
Sage is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the Publication Ethics page on the Sage Author Gateway
3.1.1 Plagiarism
Management and Labour Studies and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the Journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.
3.1.2 Prior publication
If material has been previously published it is not generally acceptable for publication in a Sage journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Please refer to the guidance on the Sage Author Gateway or if in doubt, contact the Editor at the address given below.
3.2 Contributor’s publishing agreement
Before publication, Sage requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. Sage’s Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive licence agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants Sage the sole and exclusive right and licence to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than Sage. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. For more information please visit the Sage Author Gateway
3.3 Open access and author archivin
Management and Labour Studies offers optional open access publishing via the Sage Choice programme and Open Access agreements, where authors can publish open access either discounted or free of charge depending on the agreement with Sage. Find out if your institution is participating by visiting Open Access Agreements at Sage. For more information on Open Access publishing options at Sage please visit Sage Open Access. For information on funding body compliance, and depositing your article in repositories, please visit Sage’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines and Publishing Policies.
4. Preparing your manuscript for submission
The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. LaTeX files are also accepted. A LaTex template is available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines page of our Author Gateway.
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit Sage’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines
Figures supplied in colour will appear in colour online regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced in colour in the printed version. For specifically requested colour reproduction in print, you will receive information regarding the costs from Sage after receipt of your accepted article.
This Journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc) alongside the full-text of the article. For more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files
Management and Labour Studies adheres to the APA reference style. View the APA guidelines to ensure your manuscript conforms to this reference style.
Management and Labour Studies is hosted on Sage Peer Review, a web based online submission and peer review system. Please read the manuscript submission guidelines, and then visit https://peerreview.sagepub.com/mls to login and submit your article online.
IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created.
As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process Sage is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.
The collection of ORCID IDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this Journal. If you already have an ORCID ID you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID ID will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID ID is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.
If you do not already have an ORCID ID please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors via the submission system and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. The affiliation listed in the manuscript should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a manuscript note at the end of the paper. At this stage please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).
Please also ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Copyright and Permissions page on the Sage Author Gateway
6. On acceptance and publication
Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via email, and corrections should be made directly or notified to us promptly. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate.
Online First allows final articles (completed and approved articles awaiting assignment to a future issue) to be published online prior to their inclusion in a journal issue, which significantly reduces the lead time between submission and publication. Visit the Sage Journals help page for more details, including how to cite Online First articles.
6.3 Access to your published article
Sage provides authors with online access to their final article.
Publication is not the end of the process! You can help disseminate your paper and ensure it is as widely read and cited as possible. The Sage Author Gateway has numerous resources to help you promote your work. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Gateway for tips and advice.
All editorial correspondence should be addressed to journal administrator at https://peerreview.sagepub.com/mls