STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT THOUGHT (MANAGEMENT THOUGHT)
Year:2011 | Volume:5 | Issue:1 (9)|Papers Count:8

Examining the current well-known theories of public policy process shows that they often disregard foreign or international environment of the government. In other words, current theories cannot explain the increasing similarity of public policies among countries. In an interdisciplinary research, this article reviews six selected theoretical fields which describe in some respects the imitative nature of public policies in different countries.These theoretical fields include: lesson drawing; policy convergence; policy transfer; policy diffusion; institutional isomorphism; and policy learning.Examining these theoretical fields pave the way for a new theory of public policy process specifically in nonwestern countries.

University as the symbol of higher education is an effective institution in society’s culture. Therefore culture in university organization takes on great importance. While it is just about one decade that “academic culture” has been considered in our literature, foreign scholars have researched multiple aspects of this object for about four decades. Also these few domestic studies are extremely suffering from lack of coherent theoretical foundations. So, at first it’s necessary to closely reinvestigate the foreign works to prepare reliable theoretical basics for our own researches which will be suitable for developing theories. This article has reviewed external and a few internal studies to achieve the mentioned goal and by using the typology method as a unique form of theory development has categorized them from two perspectives: (1) The object of interest in 7 categories, (2) Theoretical assumptions about university culture in 3 categories (integration, differentiation and fragmentation). The result of this theoretical reinvestigation and typology is a better understanding of multiple, and interesting features of academic culture leading to present a “conceptual framework” about culture in university for academic managers and researchers. Disciplinary cultures, students’ subcultures, comparative studies, studies of cultural change processes, administrative vs. professional subcultures, the effect of inquiry paradigms on faculty cultures and other cultural differences of them from differentiation and fragmentation perspectives, are the most important research gaps in our domestic studies.

Strategic management literature is dominated by a special approach. Introduction of other approaches in this field and recognition of their applications are great steps in strategy formation. These efforts help pubic organizations to equip themselves with particular necessities of such an approach. Also private and non-profit sectors can choose an appropriate approach in their relationship with pubic organizations. This research intends to identify the current situation of strategy formation in public organizations which are active in Iran’s economic domain, in order to provide a suitable model for developing a strategy for them by recognizing their demands.Therefore, remarkable models of typology of strategy formation process have been introduced and Whittington model has been selected.The selected model introduces 4 generic approaches: (classic, evolutionary, procedural and systemic) in the form of deliberated or emergent strategies, and uni or multi-purpose strategies.To collect data, questionnaires were administered and the results were analyzed in two phases. One was by non-parametric statistic techniques (Friedman and Kendall tests) and the other parametric statistic techniques (ANOVA). The result of analyses shows that strategy formation process in economic public organizations of Iran follow procedural, evolutionary, systemic and classic approach respectively.

System dynamics methodology has attracted researchers in different fields with the claim of recognizing the main structure of techno-socio-economic behaviors.Undoubtedly, philosophical and theoretical foundations of system dynamics or it's assumptions play an important role in the modeling process for the explanation of a problem and policy-making such that there might be different modeling processes and subsequently distinct outcomes with different foundations and also, there might be conflict between the modeler's expectations from this methodology and what would happen, in reality.However, system dynamics philosophy hadn’t been explained well from the beginning and years after its emergence and its being developed in other fields, there was a declaration from SD’s specialists in this regard. Subsequently, suggestions that are sometimes dissimilar were proposed. Thus, in this research, after reviewing proposed ideas and explaining the reasons of their dispersal; we have tried to reach a holistic explanation of system dynamics philosophy.In this regard, by using a deductive approach, philosophical foundations of SD models designed with this method are surveyed. The outcome of this survey is a paradigmatic classification of system dynamics models based on their dominant philosophical foundations. These are: positivist system dynamics, post positivist system dynamics, critical pluralist system dynamics, pragmatist system dynamics, constructivist system dynamics, transformative-emancipatory-critical system dynamics, and interpretivist system dynamics. According to this classification, it can be claimed that there are different approaches as the philosophical foundations of system dynamics. The author’s suggestion is a combined pluralism, which means based on the surveyed problem a special kind of paradigm will dominate the modeling process.

Studies about the assessment of job and organizational attitudes indicate that a unique model hasn' t been accepted by organizations. The present paper has combined various models about determining effective factors on job and organizational attitudes. It has used the confirmed tool by means of field research method in holistic form among formal and contractual employees in 80 government organizations in Zanjan province after confirmation of the questionnaire's validity and reliability. The research questionnaire was designed in two sections including twelve options about personal and organizational characteristics of employees and sixty one effective options on job and organizational attitudes with three principal factors: A- The workforce (1-colleagues 2- managers and senior managers) Bnature of job and the organization (3- job dependence, 4- organizational dependence, 5-proportion of job with employees, 6- job designing) C- organizational and environmental factors (7-work load and stress, 8- physical conditions of work, 9- salary and job benefits, 10- education, assessment and promotion, 11- equilibrium in job and family life(.Its reliability was confirmed through internal assimilation coefficient of Cronbach alpha equal to 0.966. Its validity was confirmed by means of factorial analysis method and assuming 11 factors in SPSS software, estimation method of major components according to correlation matrix and four methods of Varimax circulation, Equamax circulation, Promax circulation and Oblimin circulation. It was shown that these variables affect job and organizational attitude and the designed tool measures the intended structure. Finally, the effectiveness level of these factors on employees' job and organizational attitude was obtained through research results.

KIBS have been developed in close interaction with their clients (client orientation) because their services are intangible and often information and consumer-oriented. Therefore the quality of the services in KIBS should be examined from customers’ viewpoints. Research and Technology Organizations are one kind of KIBS. Hence, customer satisfaction is the central focus of academic institutes. Meanwhile, measuring customer satisfaction in KIBS is so difficult and complicated but it is essential.In order to define the scope of customer satisfaction in Research and Technology Organizations, this study has used case study methodology and identified and determined the customer satisfaction criteria and then quantified them. Finally, thirteen criteria have been identified as customer satisfaction criteria in Research and Technology Organizations. Then by using exploratory factorial analysis, they were divided into two factorial categories and based on confirmatory factorial analysis, factor loadings of those criteria were confirmed.

One of the most important bases for establishing meritocracy in administrative sectors of governments is the determination of managers’ competencies, especially human resource managers’ competencies, because not only do they have to be selected according to a specific framework, but also they have to guarantee the competency-based management in public sector. Therefore in this paper, after presenting a two-level model constituting some human resource managers’ competencies, especially intelligence competencies, extending competency issues from private sector to public sector is considered to be one of the most important issues in this research. After designing the questionnaire and testing its validity and reliability, it is distributed among some human resources experts and managers of Iran’s ministries, as our statistical sample. For testing the hypothesis of this evaluated research, we used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and the results of this research show the validation of all basic hypotheses and more effectiveness of Human Resource Managers Competencies (HRMC) rather than Human Resource value Proposition (HRVP). The results also show that some secondary hypotheses are rejected. In addition, Planning & Administration Competency (PAC) has a first priority and the most important index of this variable is Human Resource Affairs Planning and Organizing.