Socio-Cultural Strategy
Year:2020 | Volume:9 | Issue:34|Papers Count:6

Science production is one of the major indicators for measuring the scientific performance of a country; therefore, investigating the norms affecting the scientific productivity can help to overcome the problems in this field. This study aimed to investigate the normative and organizational factors affecting the science production of faculty members of Payame Noor University. Accordingly, a questionnaire, validated both form-wise and content-wise, including the relationship between ethical values and normative factors in Merton's theory and some of organizational norms proposed by Bland & Ruffin regarding science production was drawn up. The statistical population of this applied research, including 320 faculty members of different branches of Payame Noor University in Isfahan province responded to the questionnaires. The results showed that there was a positive and significant relationship between the faculty members' commitment to the scientific norms proposed in Merton's theory and their scientific productivity. The mean scores of respondents' perceptions of each norm showed that recognition or being recognized, communalism or collective ownership, universalism, humility, being beneficiary or disinterested, originality, and organized skepticism have all been considered by the respondents. The results also showed that there was a significant difference between the group climate, resources and facilities, university reward system, academic and cultural communications, level of English proficiency, employment status, academic degree, academic rank, the undergraduate topics and credits taught, and educational department as organizational norms with the respondents' scientific productivity. But there was no significant relationship between the respondents' scientific outputs and their gender, age, and marital status as the demographic variables, and their undergraduate teaching experiences and the university from which they have got their last degrees as educational variables.

Recently, universities, colleges, and other higher education institutes are facing a wide range of management development challenges. One of the most important requirements of managerial development is the development of successors capable of taking on important managerial positions in future. However, each organization is expected to adopt its own strategies and mechanisms. Using the qualitative research method of the content analysis approach, this research has been conducted the aiming at identifying the appropriate strategies and mechanisms to implement the succession planning system in Iran's higher education. Our data have been collected through some semi-structured interviews with 17 scholars including the policymakers, and current and former university administrators at different levels using strategies and mechanisms for establishing a succession planning system. Then the collected data were analyzed through qualitative content analysis method using Graneheim & Lundman technique. Finally, the strategies and mechanisms of realizing the succession planning system in higher education of Iran were suggested. It is worth noting that in this regard the cultural, legal, managerial, structural, and developmental strategies and mechanisms have been considered.

Over the past two decades, the development of services and urban infrastructure of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has promoted the cooperation among the major urban actors and has developed smart cities. Smart cities have in turn paved the way for significant changes in the management and control of the cities by the governments. Therefore, a comparative study of the indices of good governance and smart cities reveals the direct relationship between good governance and smart cities. The major elements of good governance including accountability, political stability, lack of violence, and effectiveness of the government are expected to be d realized in smart cities. Iran has faced a phenomenally heterogeneous urban growth over the past three decades and this trend in the capital city of Tehran calls for more attention. Numerous identity and managerial problems in Tehran require examining the relationship between good governance and smartening this city. It seems that fragmentation of management in key issues, such as policymaking, decision-making, planning, organizing, leading, and supervising, is the most serious obstacle to positive correlation between these two variables in Tehran. Using documentary and archival data, this article aims at examining its hypothesis in a descriptive-analytical manner.

Good governance is a new discourse characterized by some core elements such as rule of law, public participation, accountability, citizenship rights, and social justice. Establishing and guaranteeing the rights for the handicapped can be regarded as the most essential indicators being used to show how the citizenship rights, justice, and responsibility are secured by the government. Using a descriptive-analytical method, this paper aims to explicate the notion of good governance and to examine the inherent dignity of human beings in the Islamic world view as the basic framework for justifying the positive discrimination as the most effective mechanism to protect the rights of the disabled. Finally, some suggestions are made to promote the rights of these individuals under the effective governance in Islamic Republic of Iran. The main question of this study was as follows: What are the bases of legitimization of the mechanism of supporting the disabled through positive discrimination to secure social justice and citizenship rights as the key elements of good Islamic governance? The main hypothesis of the study is that human dignity is the basis of legitimizing the supportive mechanism of positive discrimination in Islam.

Considering the strategic significance of consumerism and extravagancy, this study aims at finding the motives behind luxury brand consumption (LBC) in the social and cultural context of Iran's society. The method used in this research is mixed (qualitative-quantitative). First, using the qualitative Grounded Theory (GT) method, the social and cultural dimensions of the subject were determined. Next, the required data were collected through a questionnaire worked out by the researchers. Regarding the purpose, the adopted method was applied; in terms of data type it was mixed; and in terms of data collection it was cross-sectional. In the first part, the sample included 15 Iranian academic experts and brand and marketing experts selected on the basis of purposeful sampling and saturation principle. In the second part, the consumers of luxury brands (clothing and watch) were studied. The questionnaire data, the reliability of which had been examined and confirmed by Cronbach's alpha coefficient, were tested through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results showed that the highest social motives behind Iranians' LBC were fame, self-description, showing-off, conformity to social mode, position and credibility, endorsement, while the strong cultural motives were social norms, individualism-collectivism, religion, and patriotism. In contrast to cultural motives, social ones seemed to play a more strategic role in LBC in Iran. Moreover, among the social motives, self-description and thirst for higher social prestige; and among the cultural motives, religion, and patriotism were particularly significant.

Today, conducting interdisciplinary studies have become an undeniable necessity in the development of knowledge and human experience. For a long time, a large part of the scientific capacity of researchers and research institutions was spent on disciplinary (intradisipliary) studies. However, in recent decades, there have been emerging signs that clearly show the growing process of combined studies, especially interdisciplinary ones. Knowledge of law as one of the most important and well-known human sciences is of no exception in this process. After the civil and political rights [freedom rights] and economic, social, and cultural rights [equality rights], correlation rights [fraternity rights] stands as the third generation of human rights. The right to the environment as one of the most developed branches of correlation rights [fraternity rights] has so far been recognized in the legal systems of more than 40 countries, including Iran. This generation of human rights, while having the characteristics of the two previous generations, without the participation of all, the individual, government, public and private institutions, and the international community, cannot be realized. Of course, it is worth noting that in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the right to the environment has not been explicitly mentioned, and the related principle (principle fifty) has been included in the fourth chapter of the Code of Economics and Finance. Of course, it was better to have been set forth in the third chapter of the code (the rights of the nation), and to have been explicitly referred to as a right to the people along with other principles of the rights of the nation. Electronic government as a prospective and comprehensive strategy, through recognizing the relationship between humans and environment and that between its components can help to improve these relationships and secure the right to a healthy environment as one of the third generation rights of human. In this study, only library data collection method was adopted and the required information was merely collected from written sources, including relevant papers, dissertations, theses, books, and the reports put out by different research centers all over the country. The collected data were then analyzed through descriptive-analytical and applied method.