Abstract
And finally, my granddaughter -Ahana! When she was about 9 months old, my daughter and son-n-law visited us from Canada. Ahana spent a beautiful three months or so with us. She would wake her mother journey, in many ways I don't want it to end. It's a great feeling, and through this I wish to acknowledge and pay my deepest respects to all those who made this journey a beautiful one. My dissertation committee comprising Prof Ramnarayan (Chair), Prof Chandra Sripada and Prof Charles Dhanaraj has been an ideal one -both Prof Ramnarayan and Prof Chandra come with extensive experience in organization behaviour -very relevant to my topic as managerial behaviour is central to my dissertation. This combines very well with Prof Charles' inputs on establishing subsidiaries and looking at the phenomenon of establishing GCCs through the lens of internalization. I want to express my deepest gratitude to Prof S Ramnarayan, my guide, for not just guiding me and supporting me every step of the way, but also for his willingness to go above and beyond the thesis research mandate to help me write a case study on Anthem. I took great pride in seeing the results of this effort being published at Harvard Business Publishing, and for this I am grateful to him and his team member, Dr Suneeta Mehta, who jumped in to help me rewrite several portions of it. It was a chance meeting with Prof Chandra somewhere in 2019 where he re-ignited my dormant extant passion to pursue a doctorate. This is where my ISB journey began, and I wanted to express my appreciation to him for helping me through my aspirational door. My sincere thanks to Prof Charles Dhanaraj who has supported my journey from across the seven seas, in the United States. His insightful comments and feedback on international business, subsidiary mandates and approach have helped shaped my final output. No pursuit of this nature can be complete without institutional support. For this I am grateful to Prof Rajendra Srivastava, Prof Sanjay Kallapur, Prof Ramana Sonti, Prof Abhishek Kathuria, Ashima Sood, and the entire very responsive team at the Indian School of Business. I want to specifically mention the following: Geetika Shah, Arun Khan, K Jayashree, Phanibala V, Naveen, the LRC team (comprising Aslam, Jaya Lakshmi, Surendra, Satyabrata Das), Sona Raman, Sunitha Anand. I must complement and thank my entire 2019 cohort for their continued encouragement and support. Once you are off campus and in a different city, continuing the research by your lonesome requires motivation. This the entire cohort provided in abundance, but I specifically want to call out Raj Swaminathan who has pushed and egged me on in the times when I most needed it. I wish him the very best in his research journey. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the following for patiently taking out time and providing me with their inputs for my research. Without their agreement to spend their time and participate and of course, their very deep insights, this research could not have been completed: 1 National Association of Software Companies (nasscom | The trade association of Indian IT BPM industry) 2 Adapted from: A historical review of the information technology and business process captive centre sector. Journal of information Technology, 27(4), 270-284) (Oshri & Van Uhm, 2012) 3 As quoted in Wall Street journal, Feb 11, 2004 From Anthem Inc and Legato (Anthem is now called Elevance Health and Legato is now called Carelon Global Solutions, aka CGS): Additionally, KS Viswanathan and Sukanya Roy of NASSCOM helped validate some of my initial thinking prior to the detailed interviews. I appreciate their support and inputs. I would be remiss if I did not mention my family -my wife, Kadambari, daughters Akanksha and Abhilasha, my son-in-law, Varun, and my father, V.P. Seth, who have always encouraged me to pursue my academic dreams. Especially Kadambari, who had to put up with many of my rants about the rigor involved in research, and on many an occasion had to gamely put off an activity or outcome that was planned for us together in deference to the time I needed to devote to this. A big thank you!
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