Sharif Digital Repository

One of Iran’s most important priorities at present is the development of the human resources and one of the most important skills of this human resource is decision making and problem solving. During the past few years, there have been numerous criticisms about the educational system in Iran without a substantial solution being offered to replace the existing approach. Aseman Group has been trying to promote system thinking in children. In Aseman, they believe that system thinking is one probable solution in order to develop thinking, decision making and problem solving skills in our human resource at early age. However, one of the many problems facing this group, is the resistance shown by... 

Organizational learning is essential for organizations to grow and survive. Organizations can gain competitive advantage through proper organizational learning. Number of studies in this field in recent years shows the importance of this issue among practioners and academics. The first step in managing organzaitonal learning is its measurement. Organizations can be provided with solutions if an appropriate measurement tool is designed. The main question of this research is whether this tool can be designed or not so that organizational learning in organizational processes can be measured. Despite the significance of organizational learning measurement, the current studies in this field lack... 

The main question of this research is this: what mechanisms drive the increase of the share of health costs in GDP in Germany? Answering this question not only improves our understanding about health systems in general, but also is specifically useful for the health system of Iran, since it is experiencing similar trends as the health system of Germany does. Since these mechanisms are complex and the ability of human brain to process several interacting variables simultaneously is low, we need a strong methodology and a tool to overcome this limitation. System thinking as a methodology and system dynamics as its tool help us do so. Using system dynamics, we will develop a computer model... 

Recently, the number of multi business companies in Iran has increased. Nevertheless, they are challenged with several management and control issues, due to an unstable business and political environment in Iran as well as a lack of comprehensive knowledge in related fields. Thus conducting studies to address these issues in Iran’s special context would have a suitable impact on the successful management of these multi business companies. The main objective of this study is to determine suitable management mechanisms for regulating subsidiary-parent relationship. These mechanisms should be selected in a way to be aligned with subsidiary’s business context, which would lead to create benefit... 

The purpose of this research has been measuring how much studied companies use different levers of controls. Management control system has been described as the system which ensures the organization about implementing its strategy (Antony, 2004; Simons, 1995). In this research we chose Levers of Control framework (Simons, 1995) as the proper model to describe management control systems in organizations. Using related literatures, we developed a questionnaire to measure how much different organizations use each levers of control. The proposed questionnaire was distributed in three businesses with different Value Creation Logics (Stabell & Fjeldstad, 1998), to provide a ... 

This study examines the impact of Corporate Governance on the survival of firms. The main goal in this research is to find the most important factors of Corporate Governance affecting the survival of a firm. Research method is qualitative. Survival is binary. It means whether a firm is alive or bankrupt. All samples used in this research are alive, but they are different in the extent they hope to be alive. So, first of all the criteria that estimate the hope of survival of a firm are defined using the literature of survival. In the next step, some firms are selected that are different in the extent they hope to survive. Next, these firms are compared in their quality of Corporate... 

The purpose of this research is to determine and measure the mechanisms which cause an increase in pace, scope and intensity of organizational learning at schoolsand four levels are defined in it for learning concept at a high school: beginner, struggling, developed and learning. Having learning capacity increased, the school upgrades to another level. The features of organizational learning are different at each one of the above cited levels. At the beginner level, learning takes place little by little and at a very low pace, and its effect is observable as professional transformation of the organization members. At higher levels, it occurs at a higher rate and enjoys a wider scope and... 

There are six core concepts in the organization theories that theorists rely on. These six concepts are: environment , social structure, technology, culture, physical structure, power and control. the insights of theorists about each of these concepts lead to different theory in case, they argue. The enactment environment theory by carl weik, is one way of conceptualizing the organizational environment within the interpretive paradigm and offer an approach about the organization and its environment. The logic of the enactment environment theory based on the belief that organizational realities parallel to people interact and negotiate and make sense of their experiences are socially... 

Each National Health System has to choose a combination of health and treatment programs, as the health policy to keep people healthy. As a result of shared resources, the more concentration on treatment, make health program weaker and so thegreater rate of prevalence of diseases and the more burden on treatment programs. At this situation, the problem of lack of ability to pay for health services and products will seriously threaten the health of society. Based on statistics of health status, Iran is going to face this state. So here at this thesis, in order to simulate and study the behaviors of key state variables during the time, the model of national health system developed by system... 

The strategic importance of Dynamic Capability (DC) has been a central theme in Strategic Management literature since Teece article released in 1997. But, relatively little attention has been given to the operationalization of the concept in organizations. In this paper we propose a framework based on Pavlo and Daneel researches to identify DC in an organization. Through a in-depth case study in dairy industry we explore the detail component of our framework. With a series of interviews with managers and experts of an Iranian dairy producing company, we first confirmed the framework as a whole and then we conclude that the process of DC introduced by Pavlo can have different interpretation... 

Systems thinking is considered to be an indispensible competency in dealing with complex issues. Although several studies tried to substantiate this claim in the past from different perspectives, none rigorously focused on how the practitioners' characteristics affect systems thinking practice. In this paper we propose that a person's narcissism hinders his/her ability to practice systems thinking effectively in ego-relevant issues, although he/she might be relatively capable to think systemically in general. Ego-relevant issues are defined as those matters that may cause eventual threat to the person's self-esteem or provide opportunities to self-promote. A systems thinking questionnaire... 

Social enterprises are organisations comprised of two conflicting logics: social and commercial. However, simultaneous commitment to both logics often leads to tensions, making social enterprises fragile organisations at the risk of mission drift. The extant literature on hybridity highlights two important overall strategies – integration and differentiation - for managing tensions. However, integration or differentiation alone can create additional problems, which is especially true in the case of differentiation, creating a situation comparable to black and white, with a salient faultline and heated conflicts. In this inductive qualitative case study, responding to the recent call in the... 

Integrated modeling of learning makes happen simultaneous investigation and analysis of the interaction among different scales, abstraction levels and contexts within an organization. Enquiry of the organization, organizational unit and individual employee scales at levels of low and high abstraction within temporal, spatial and event-driven contexts may have conspicuous impact on perspicuousness of learning concept, as well as the creation of productive policy making opportunities which improves system performance measurements and their influencing causes. By development in multi-method approach to system modeling, integrated representation of learning has got recently feasible. Thus, a... 

In an era of data revolution, information systems (IS) and information technologies (IT) play a vital role in the survival of organisations. However, technology application within organisations does not happen automatically or seamlessly. Various external and internal factors can affect the different stages of the technology adoption process, from decision-making to inter- and intra-organisational diffusion. The investigation of factors that influence the adoption level of various technological solutions in different contexts has been an interesting subject for scholars. This study examines the mechanisms through which various factors affect organisations in the architecture, engineering and... 

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is a popular distributed computing paradigm for many applications which in-volve exchange of information among a large number of peers. In such applications, large amount of data is distributed among multiple dispersed sources. Therefore, data analysis is challenging due to processing, storage and transmission costs. Moreover, the data rarely remains static and frequent data changes, quickly out date previously extracted data mining models. Distributed data mining deals with the problem of data analysis in environments with distributed data and computing resources. In this dissertation, we explore distributed data mining in different structures of P2P systems. In...