One of the primary issues on many developing countries is educational failure associated with schoolchildren or university students. Many students cannot continue their educations for different reasons such as lack of family support either financially or emotionally. In this paper, we study the effects of family background characteristics on educational participation in one of Iranian cities. We select 40 students who have the history of educational failure and distribute some questionnaire among them. Our survey is mainly based on relationship between family characteristics such as age, educational level, etc. The results indicate that different family characteristics could highly influence educational failure. Some of the most important factors that all students agreed on are family dispute, lack of interest and support on behalf of their parents, disregarding students & apos; creativity, university professors with weak performance and high living expenses as well as high tuitions. There are other issues, which could impact educational failure such as having a university with good discipline and studying in overcrowded classes.

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of service quality on the overall customer satisfaction in telecommunication industry of Pakistan. Survey questionnaires are used to collect the data from the postpaid users of different telecommunication service providers. Stepwise regression analysis is used to examine the research hypothesis. The results show that service quality has positive association with the overall customer satisfaction. This study is a unique approach, which describes the factors affecting customer’s satisfaction. The findings of this research provide insights for the managers to develop and maintain the customer’s desired service quality. Implications for marketing strategists and researchers are presented.

The study of culture, gender and leadership behavior has received much interest from researchers during the last three decades. This paper attempts to propose a conceptual framework consisting three human resource management (HRM) practices (culture, gender and leadership styles) and to explain the relationship among these variables. Culture plays an important role to adopt different leadership styles because it influences the way in which individuals, groups and teams interact with each other and cooperate to achieve organizational goals. The seven cultural elements are measured in the current study i.e., i) member identity ii) rewards criteria iii) team emphasis iv) means-end orientation v) control vi) unit integration and vii) risk/ conflict tolerance. Results show that the culture has a significant influence on male leaders to adopt different leadership styles, but female leaders likely participative in their leadership positions and try to adopt democratic leadership in different cultures.

Green supply chain management (GSCM) has emerged as a proactive approach for improving environmental performance of processes and products in accordance with the requirements of environmental regulations. The aim of this paper is to determine and model the drivers of GSCM to put environmental activities into practice. Thirty-four measurement items are developed on the basis of opinions from industrial experts and the literature and the necessary data are collected. To validate the measurement scales for GSCM, we perform a factor analysis. The results show that a six-factor measurement model (including internal environmental management, green purchasing, cleaner production, recovery, eco-design and pollution) fits the data acceptably. All of the measurement items significantly loaded on the constructs on which they were hypothesized to load. These results gave us confidence that the measures are indeed valid and reliable.

Cost benefit analysis (CBA) is a useful tool for investment decision-making from economic point of view. When the decision involves conflicting goals, the multi-attribute analysis approach is more capable; because there are some social and environmental criteria that cannot be valued or monetized by cost benefit analysis. The complex nature of decision-making in road safety normally makes it difficult to reach a single alternative solution that can satisfy all decision-making problems. Generally, the application of multi-attribute analysis in road sector is promising; however, the applications are in preliminary stage. Some multi-attribute analysis techniques, such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP) have been widely used in practice. This paper presents an integrated framework with CBA and AHP methods to select proper alternative in road safety projects. The proposed model of this paper is implemented for a case study of improving a road to reduce the accidents in Iran. The framework is used as an aid to cost benefit tool in road safety projects.

In recent decades, provision-chain management has been one of the major concepts. The main reason that attracts attention to the concept is the increase in competition and struggle for the survival. There are different ways to increase the competition in organizations such as increasing productivity by acquiring information technology.
In this paper, we present an integrated model with the balanced score card framework for supplier selection strategy. The proposed model of this paper gathers 161 important factors suggested in the literature and selects the six most important ones using different multi criteria techniques. We also propose a goal programming techniques with some hard constraints and implement the mathematical model for real-world case study of auto industry. The proposed model is solved in four different forms using TOPSIS, VIKOR and the combination of these 2 factors with factor analysis. The preliminary results indicate that a combination of VIKOR and factor analysis presented better results with 9% reduction in costs, 38% increase of quality, and 3.2% increase in acceptability.

In this paper, we present a study to determine the level of awareness of school principles on professional social work in the city of Esfehan, Iran. The proposed study of this paper distributes questionnaire among eighty principle managers who work for different schools in this city. The first part of the questionnaire is devoted to people & apos; s personal characteristics such as gender, age, etc. and the second part is associated with the some questions about their awareness on professional social work. The study, for instance, finds that there is a meaningful relationship between job experience and gender and awareness when the statistical significance level is less than five percent but there is no relationship between the level of education and the awareness on professional social work.

Distribution refers to the steps taken to move and store a product from the suppliers to a customers in the supply chain and is a key driver of the overall profitability of a firm and overall supply chain. In this paper, a problem regarding managing of the move and store of goods are articulated and a mathematical model is presented to solve the model. The objective function is the total costs of distribution network, including transportation, storage rental, general warehousing, goods damages due to the transportation and storage, procurement, packing, and finally loading and unloading costs. The cost components described are defined based on the assumptions for a real distribution network of a chain stores firm. The aim of developing such a model is to find the optimum pattern to move and store goods based on the minimum cost of the distribution network.

The aim of this research is to present a hybrid model to select auto part suppliers. The proposed method of this paper uses factor analysis to find the most influencing factors on part maker selection and the results are validated using different statistical tests such as Cronbach & apos; s Alpha and Kaiser-Meyer. The hybrid model uses analytical network process to rank different part maker suppliers and fuzzy goal programming to choose the appropriate alternative among various choices. The implementation of the proposed model of this paper is used for a case study of real-world problem and the results are discussed.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is founded based on the value exchange between organization and customers and focuses merely on the value created in this connection. In this paper, the critical success factors are identified for a proper and effective implementation of CRM for an oil distribution company. The proposed survey of this paper identifies some important factors affecting the CRM implementation and determines the most important ones using a survey. The results indicate that there are twelve factors playing the most important roles on the success of CRM. There are CRM strategy, knowledge management in customer relationship, CRM technology, effective strategic committee, management of customer contact channels, customer information management, customer-oriented change management, training programs, strategic communication with staff, staff commitment, integration, and sectional implementation. We categorize the factors into two levels based on the level of their importance. The first level consists of the most important ones include only four items and the other eight items are categorized in level 2.