The recent global developments followed by altered attitudes have improved women’s contribution to small and medium enterprises. However, women’s employment in Iranian SME is not in a good condition. In fact, attitude of society towards women together with socio-cultural environments have resulted in reduced rate of women’s employment in developing companies. However, for changing these attitudes the relevant layout should be created anyway. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to enumerate factors affecting women’s employment in Tehran SME from those women’s views. In this regard, we applied Lerner & apos; s model which is more comprehensive than the other similar models. The analysis was carried out through distribution of some questionnaires among a statistical population including 384 women living in the city of Tehran. After data analysis and hypothesis testing, it was concluded that economic elements (as an environmental factor), achievement requirement (as an individual factor) and encouragement (as an organizational factors) respectively affect women’s employment.

With ever increasing demand for manufactured products of hard alloys and metals with high surface finish and complex shape geometry, more interest is now being paid to non-traditional machining (NTM) processes, where energy in its direct form is used to remove material from workpiece surface. Compared to conventional machining processes, NTM processes possess almost unlimited capabilities and there is a strong believe that use of NTM processes would go on increasing in diverse range of applications. Presence of a large number of NTM processes along with complex characteristics and capabilities, and lack of experts in NTM process selection domain compel for development of a structured approach for NTM process selection for a given machining application. Past researchers have already attempted to solve NTM process selection problems using various complex mathematical approaches which often require a profound knowledge in mathematics/artificial intelligence from the part of process engineers. In this paper, four NTM process selection problems are solved using an integrated PROMETHEE (preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation) and GAIA (geometrical analysis for interactive aid) method which would act as a visual decision aid to the process engineers. The observed results are quite satisfactory and exactly match with the expected solutions.

This paper presents the development of an instrument for measuring strategic control systems (SCS). Although SCS has received considerable attention in the literature, most of the discussions, on the elements that constitute SCS, are limited to descriptive statements. Thus, the theoretical construct of SCS suffers from lack of extensive statistical validation procedures. However, there are a few authors that had initiated the development of an instrument to measure the SCS. Their small effort had also been criticized due to the inconsistency among authors in defining SCS, which would likely affect the validity of the instrument being developed. Given this lacuna, this paper has developed and validated an instrument for conceptualizing SCS, specifically under the environment of Quality Management strategy. Based on a careful and systematic process of instrument development, this paper revealed that SCS consists of two important dimensions, namely strategy implementation and strategic resource allocation. In developing this instrument, a total number of 205 respondents were involved. The findings reported in this paper would benefit future researchers in measuring SCS, particularly for survey-based research.

It has been a long time that researchers are trying to find out on why some people have better mental health than others do and some are more successful than the others are. There are many evidences to believe that having general intelligence does not necessarily yield prosperity and success and it could be accounted up to 20% of the success, whereas the remaining 80% is associated with other issues. The present study attempts to perform a comparative study on emotional intelligence and cognitive among successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs. We adopt a standard test, which includes 133 questions and distribute it between two groups of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs in province of Sistan and Balochestan located in south west of Iran. The results of our ANOVA test when the level of significance is five percent reveal that emotional intelligence can substantially impact on the success of entrepreneurs.

One of the primary governmental concerns is to understand the level of economical and social development in different locations of a country. Understanding social and economical characteristics of different cities help provide necessary assistance for underdeveloped areas and promote some value added activities such as tourism in better-developed areas. In this paper, we present an empirical study based on Factor Analysis to rank different towns, villages and cities located in city of Isfahan, Iran in terms of various socio-economical criteria. The study gathers necessary information from 1996 to 2007. The results of our survey indicate that three cities of Feridan, Nayeen and Falavarjan are in the best position in terms of different social and cultural criteria while Lenjan, Barkhar and Mymehand Isfahan are located in the worst positions.

Purpose of this research paper is to find out relationship between varying color scheming in advertising and buying behavior. Data for this purpose were collected from 200 people through questionnaire. Results indicated that buying behavior is greatly influenced by color scheming of a product and its advertisement. Strategies discussing how to enhance color scheming of product and use of colors in ads are also discussed.

The study performs an empirical survey to measure the impact of stress among people with various gender and marital status in a hydropower unit located in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study performs the survey among all 81 people who were working for customer service section of this company and consists of two parts, in the first part; we gather all private information such as age, gender, education, job experience, etc. through seven important questions. In the second part of the survey, there were 66 questions, which included all the relevant factors impacting employees & apos; stress. We implement two Levin and t-student tests to see whether gender or marital status has any meaningful influences on creating stress among people. The results indicate that gender has no meaningful impact on creating stress among employees who worked for this hydro plant except difficulty of job conditions. The other findings of this paper is that stress posed from management team had different impacts on employees with various marital status but there were no meaningful differences between married and single couples in terms of other factors posing stress such as unsuitable working conditions, fear of job stability or difficulty of job conditions.

Today, customer return issue in e-purchase process is considered as important topic in companies' marketing and managerial decision making. In this paper, we present an empirical study on measuring the impact of e-loyalty for an Iranian auto-industry called Pars Khodro co. The proposed study measures reliability, responsiveness, design, security/privacy as independent variables, e-confidence and e-satisfaction as mediator variable, and e-loyalty as dependent variable. The preliminary results show that effectiveness of e-satisfaction and e-confidence on loyalty and effectiveness of e-confidence on e-satisfaction are in high level. Reliability/Fulfillment and security variables on e-confidence have significant impacts, and effectiveness level of reliability/Fulfillment and responsiveness and website design on e-satisfaction is high. The results indicate that there is no significant relationship between responsiveness and e-confidence.

This paper investigates the dynamics of the NASDAQ topology before, during, and after 2008 financial crisis. First, multiresolution analysis by virtue of wavelet transform is employed to denoise each NASDAQ sector return series. Second, the correlation matrix of sectors is built and analyzed in each time period to view comovements of sectors. Third, hierarchical clustering trees are constructed in each time period to find out how the structure of the NASDAQ market evolves through time. Our results suggest that interrelationships between sectors become stronger in times of crisis and especially in post-crisis period. In addition, some markets tend to form the same cluster in all time periods; for instance the Industrial and Bank sectors and the Telecommunication and Computer sectors. However, the general topology of the NASDAQ market has been considerably changed over periods. In sum, the complex structure of the NASDAQ market is dynamic and is more integrated after 2008 financial crisis. This result indicates that there are less diversification opportunities in the post-crisis period in comparison with pre-crisis period. These empirical findings are important for the development of subsequent portfolio strategies.

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, finding useful information from the Internet has become a critical issue. Automatic classification of user navigation patterns provides a useful tool to solve these problems. In this paper, we propose an approach for classification of users’ navigation patterns and prediction of users’ future requests. Users’ profiles are constructed based on Web log server files and one of clustering methods is implemented to users’ profiles for assigning navigation patterns. Finally, using neural network, recommender engine produces a relevant recommendation list of web pages to the active user. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed approach has high accuracy and coverage in prediction of users’ future requests.