A novel concept, local content, in oil industry is gradually emerging. Local content should be defined in terms of value addition in local country (by local staff, local materials, local services and facilities) rather than in terms of ownership of the company performing the value added activities. Many oil exporting countries have taken a positive approach toward local content development to maximize the benefits from oil and gas extraction. The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model for local content development in petroleum industry. Local content can generally be defined in terms of the ownership and/ or location of the enterprises involved in production and/ or the value-added in the production process. Local content promotion will have to vary significantly between countries, depending on the current status of their economic, political and social development. This model is useful for state governments to consider all aspects and factors affecting local content development generally. Local content development outcomes are economic growth, industrial growth and spillover effects. The paper begins with examining the factors accommodated in literature believed to influence the local content promotion. Based on our review, the conceptual model derived includes key factors of local content that evaluate local content development, and examine interrelations between local policies, local infrastructure, local environment, and local capability.

The aim of this study is to study the relationship between organizational culture and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) with employees’ empowerment. Empowering employee’s breeds success by providing a suitable framework to utilize the necessary skills in an attempt to realize organizational goals. In this paper, four dimensions of employees’ empowerment including meaningfulness, choice, competence and impact are investigated. We also identify four dimensions for organizational culture including adaptability, consistency, involvement and mission. The paper also specifies five basic dimensions of OCB, which consists of altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy and civic virtue. These basic dimensions of both independent and dependent variables construct the research conceptual model and the required data is gathered from the Tehran Municipality. This proposed study considers 180 employees who participated in our survey. The investigation of the proposed model is also performed based on the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).

Internet marketing plays an important role in today business enterprises. Today, many invest more and more to increase their abilities on providing better services on the internet. In this paper, we study the impact of five factors namely awareness from the site, site attractiveness, promotional effectiveness, effectiveness and Shopping impacts and effectiveness and loyalty on the success of electronic marketing. We have distributed a questionnaire consists of various questions and distributed them among 984 people and received 595 in Likert scale. The Cronbach alphas for all five sets of questions were well above the minimum desired level. We implement a multi regression function and the results confirm that all five mentioned factors impact the sales of e-marketing, significantly.

Supplier selection, inventory management and optimal lot sizing has been one of the most important issues in many industries especially in production planning issues associated with texture industry. The proposed model of this paper first introduces an algorithm to choose the best supplier and it determines the optimal lot size using discount strategy. The proposed model of this paper considers different influencing factors such as location, quality of materials, cost, and mutual trust for supplier selection, determines their relative importance weights and then a discounting method is used to determine the ordering lot-size. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed model of this paper can be implemented in texture industry, very efficiently since the ordering discount policy is not sensitive to changes on inventory holding and setup expenditures.

Critical thinking (CT) has been one of the most popular interests among many scholars, educators, and others who are concerned with thinking skills. There are many evidences to believe that critical thinking skills can lead to more prepared, productive and employable students in the workforce. On the other hand, religious educations have been increasing subject of interest in different countries. When the rules and regulations in a country are based on religious, it is necessary to use religious educational systems as part of regular teaching education. However, there are common factors between CT and religious education and we can benefit from these common factors. This paper studies on recent advances on critical thinking and existing common factors between CT and religious educations. We explain that a hybrid of CT and religious education helps people search for truth, gives precise vision, helps use unbiased judgment, increases tolerance, helps become independent, helps people have fair judgment and work harder.

In the current competitive environment, managers do their best to convert organizations under their supervision into competitive and responsive through creating capability of timely delivery of quality products and services. In the other word, they try to create value for their customers, which yield more profitability for stakeholders. In line with this, determining of inter-organizational factors and the relationships among these variables and supply chain performance plays an important role in achieving these objectives. The relationship modeling is a type of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, which requires applying experts to determine the relationships. The Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is an MCDM tool, which not only can convert the relationships among cause and effect criteria into a visual structural framework, but also it can be used as a technique to handle the inner dependences within a set of criteria. This paper proposes an effective solution based on DEMATEL approach to help managers evaluate the relationships between inter-organizational factors and supply chain performance.

In this paper, we propose an empirical survey between two groups of people who work for two types of governmental organizations asking them whether they prefer to receive their salaries based on their personal characteristics such as job experience, educational background and job performance. The results of our experience indicate that the people who participated in our survey mostly believe that the payment must be performed based on their performance and those who could contribute more must be entitled more in terms of their salaries. The preliminary results of our survey indicate that the payment system must be based on the level of education; work experiences and ob performance. In addition, the people who participate in our survey mostly believe that a transparent policy in payment system helps employees increase their motivation.

This paper presents an empirical study to identify factors influenced on knowledge sharing of employees in organization. With wide literature review in knowledge management, we identify important factors in sharing knowledge including trust, culture, organizational structure, employee & apos; s attitude to share knowledge, and motivation method. The survey is based on a questionnaire consists of 25 items to measure the impact of important factors. Research population is selected from state and private bank & apos; s employees. The preliminary results show that only organizational structure has not significant impact on knowledge sharing.

Nowadays, concerning organizations’ needs as well as emphasis from academia, an increasing endeavor from organizations to design and implement knowledge management projects is evident. However, implementation of any project, particularly in preliminary phases, could render some degree of risk and threat. Thus, it is obvious that failure in recognizing and managing those risks could bring about unsuccessfulness within an organization. In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to find the most important factors influencing knowledge management (KM) implementation in one of industries in Iran. The proposed study designed a questionnaire, distributed among most of the workers, and analyzed the results. The study divided KM implementation in four stages of planning, execution, development and institutional. We have also considered four important factors within each stage. The results indicate that culture was the most important barrier during all four stages. In addition, technology was an important issue during the execution stage while content was important during the development stage.

Entrepreneurs are big potentials for developing economy in any countries. They provide new job opportunities and help economy boost. There are literally many industries, which rely on new these people and they are considered as the primary source of generating new jobs. In this paper, we discuss three entrepreneurship opportunities including universities, technical and vocational centers and women. Universities are able to educate highly skilled people and send them to business and they are able to create new ideas. Technical and vocational centers are, in fact, the best place for training basic or recent advances in technological skills through short term or long term planning. The survey also indicates that women can be considered as a good source of job creation. In this paper, we review the recent related literature on entrepreneurship opportunities in the world and discuss some of the related issues more specifically in Iran.