Journal of Management Future Research
Year:2015 | Volume:26 | Issue:102|Papers Count:7

The future world will bring different and diverse social and economic realities. Population growth in developing countries leads to this fact that funding sources and budget are divided among more people. The people's demands increase and, subsequently, the price of livelihoods, health, security, education and transport increases as well. Globally speaking, education is subject to this phenomenon. The university, as an institution of higher education, is an ever-changing reality. Despite the significant increase in the number of students applying in this sector, budget allocation to universities lags behind. On the other hand, the nature of this population is changing as well because more middle-aged student groups as well as ordinary students enter into this field. Regarding their diverse family status, living conditions, social and professional needs, time to respond to demands and geographical distance, these students have different needs that affect the structure and implementation of education. As such, higher education sector and those universities that are not actively and professionally involved in this inevitable change as well as those universities that do not have a scientific future studies and planning to face this reality will lose market share. There are evidence that indicate that universities and higher education institutions and private sector will share the opportunity of commercialization of higher education and take advantage of this new opportunity. The necessity and demand for continuous and everlasting learning provides a great profitable and economic opportunity and capacity for universities. Commercialization of higher education in Iran is faced with important and challenging uncertainties. Future studies can examine the commercialization of higher education via investigating the past as well as main changes, trends, indicators and emerging phenomena in this domain. Furthermore, alternative scenarios for the future of commercialization of higher education in Iran in an active confrontation with main environmental uncertainties will be identified thereof.

Futures studies as an academic field is a new era of social science that concerns a historical issue knowing future, in scientific approach. Futures Studies as a branch of social science has its own paradigms, theories and schools of thoughts that explains future dimension. During decades many methods and tools has been developed to study trends, emerging issues and events by scholars and professionals. In this paper authors are reviewing the evolution of theoretical foundations of futures studies to explain the key concepts and basis of this era; Including the development of thinking about future of civilization and utopia since the 16th century to the present, differences between prediction and futures study, alternative futures versus single predefined future, dimensions of the future, path dependencies versus future breaking, tools and methods of futures studies. In light of this review, a conceptual framework has been developed to choose appropriate strategy for futures studies research. However without deep understanding and systematic methodology of futures research, applying tools could not meet the complicated needs of societies and organization in face of emerging issues in further new world.

Tehran's population growth and the entry of new immigrants has been one of the problems for governors, policy makers, and planners. Therefore, since the middle decades of the current century, as a concern, it has been considered as a threat to social, environmental, health, and disaster preparedness issues. However, the activities have been performed to prevent Tehran population growth, failed to achieve success and in spite of all these activities, the problem of Tehran population and immigration growth still exists. In this paper, causal layered analysis (CLA) as a futures study method is used for splitting and analyzing the several layers leading to the issue of Tehran immigration growth, and different scenarios are considered for the future. In this regard, based on analysis of the under layers and due to the uncertainty and importance, "development model" and "cultural orientation" are identified as its drivers and the scenarios are designed according to them.

The appearance of new technologies and its penetration on various aspects of human life brings as well as their effects on its future, is bring on award for people that effective on whole dimensions of future people life and twenty firs century. Hence careers are need to literacy, knowledge, new skills such as ability to work with computer so that educations, Culture and new thinking are requirement for the entrance to this area.Then E-literacy is known as Read, write and ability to information understanding from Electronic media such it is a critical requirement for activity in all areas particularly in trading.This study is descriptive as well as practical from goal point of view, so that it present specialists and management insight in order to increase business activity based on information and relationship technology skills.Questionnaire and archive information were used for data gathering. The question of questionnaire based on existence variables in conceptual model of research in ICDL world Foundation models, were prepared and that used and for analysis of data were used whereas the single variable test was applied. The results explored that the specialist and managements insight seven ICDL skills as well as English language skill have significance relationships with commercial activities in small and medium companies so that their predominant relationship are as follow: widespread page presentation based computer, word processing, applicable concept of computer, familiar with and usage of databank, familiar with internet, employment of English language in computer applicability, basic conception of hardware, respectively.

Today, the term "strategic foresight" is widely used to describe the activities and processes that help decision-makers to guide the companies' future action plan. This study was undertaken to identify and prioritize the Components of strategic foresight capabilities, crisis management and human resource agility in the blood transfusion organization using Delphi and AHP techniques during 1393. The study population consists of the managers, officials and experts in Isfahan Blood Transfusion Center and 3 accident-prone provinces with at least 10 years of experience which includes 160 people. The study utilized Delphi Technique to identify the components of strategic foresight capabilities, crisis management and human resource agility in Isfahan Blood Transfusion Center and AHP method to prioritize these components. Based on the obtained results from the Delphi method 5 components for strategic foresight capabilities, 5 components for HR Agility and 6 components for crisis management were identified that each of which has also the components which are prioritized and weighted using AHP method.

Most of the futures study methods evaluate the concerning variables and drivers seperately to predict or examine the events. However, some times there is a need to analyze the event occurance probability in correlation with a series of predicted events. The Cross Impact Analysis method is the key to this problem. Requiring more complex statistical processing to achieve the results, the Cross Impact Analysis method, like the Delphi method, is based on the experts opinions. The main approach in this method is to determine the event occurance probability or various driver forces seperately and ask the experts opinions for the event occurance probability in case of other event occurances and their cross impact. In advanced methods of this analysis, discussed in this study, event occurance probability is reviewed in the chain of reasons between events. Thus, a matrix of the primary probabilities and conditional probabilities and directed event cross impact relations and driving forces is designed. The common methods of this analysis defines rules based on the two logic of probabilities and structures relations for the events impacts on each other. However, both methods are not used for the cross impacts. In this study, authors presented a new method of correlation logic to cover both positive and negative impacts of events on each other using a review on available methods of cross impact analysis. Cross impact analysis method usually leads to a scenario.