
"The Elements of Style"
The referees who passed this gaseous horror of a paper should be publicly mocked for laziness. They should have returned the manuscript to the journal editor with a copy of Strunk and White's immortal "Elements of Style" for forwarding to the paper's "authors", along with a note suggesting that the writing style alone disqualifies it for publication.
The referees may have been unable to spot the plagiarism, but on mere stylistic grounds alone, the paper makes a mockery of the concept of clarity.
One suspects the referees of saying "well, I can't figure out what they're saying, so I'll assume it's all good." Shame on them.
When I wrote my PhD thesis, my research supervisor and I spent hours every day polishing the language. At the time, I was in despair at his nit-picking ways, but in retrospect I see that he was working hard to attain a kind of lapidary prose where not one word was redundant and not one logical connection was obscured. Good to him, and hail to his memory.
PS: I realized that this paper came from the Indian Institute of Management. Aha, now all is clear: management! Betcha they have MBA's or some similar qualification, the attainment of which does not require development of an understanding of the concepts "mine" and "thine" and their differences.