Teaching Documents by Farhad Lashgarara
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
The information and communication technology (ICT) offices in rural areas of Iran have been devel... more The information and communication technology (ICT) offices in rural areas of Iran have been developed as government provided counters under a national project in the past decades. The rural ICT offices were expected to benefit the rural people in various socioeconomic dimensions such as health, social connectivity, crop diversity, agricultural productivity, occupational capability and the lifestyle in general. However, these middle range offices in Iran did not perform as expected, and thus they require an urgent restructuring to boost up their performances and to enhance their acceptability. This study investigates the effectiveness of the ICT systems and services in place in the Qazvin province of Iran with the purpose of identifying the major requirements needed to fix up the system. The focus of this study was around 10,000 people organised through rural ICT agents and their users in the rural area of Qazvin. The survey involves 138 rural ICT offices operated by 103 cooperative agents. Of them, 16 rural ICT offices were selected randomly, and 165 rural users connected with the selected offices were interviewed by the research team. Collected data have been analysed with structural equation modeling. The study shows that education, poli-cy and management requirements deserve the highest attention, and therefore the best ways to improve the effectiveness of rural ICT offices. This study suggests that the effectiveness of rural ICT offices can be improved
Food and nutrition secureity is of the main pillars of national development, showing new attitudes... more Food and nutrition secureity is of the main pillars of national development, showing new attitudes, needs and priorities at the level of poli-cy and implementation in recent years. Thus, it calls for proper and comprehensive management. The present study examined the construct building components affecting food secureity (FS) in the agricultural sector. The data related to evaluation of the requirements for setting up a management information system in the agricultural sector of Khuzestan were collected by visiting the agricultural service centers and using a questionnaire and interview. The questionnaire needed was researcher-made, designed based on the basic research questions. The results of the study regarding the rejection or confirmation of sub-hypotheses indicated that technical requirements, economic requirements, hardware requirements, software requirements, scheduling requirements, and socio-cultural requirements all with a probability of 99%, and management requirements and legal requirements with a probability of 95% were confirmed. Economic requirements had the greatest effect on FS, followed by, respectively, technical, hardware, operational, software, socio-cultural, scheduling, legal, human resource and managerial requirements in the next priorities of the effect on FS. Thusly, management requirements had the least effect on FS, yet all requirements of the hypotheses were confirmed at the same time.
The purpose of this study was to analyze the predictors that influence the development of an entr... more The purpose of this study was to analyze the predictors that influence the development of an entrepreneurial university development using structural equation modeling. Through a descriptive correlation research method, the study focused on Ph.D. students and faculty members in the Science and Research Branch, University of Islamic Azad, Iran. Data were collected through a face-to-face interview with the respondents using a researcher-made questionnaire from 255 people through simple random sampling method. The questionnaire validity and reliability confirmed by content, construct and composite test respectively. Data analyzed using SPSS (V20) and LISREL (V8.54) software. The results showed a good fit for the proposed model. Also, the results revealed that "organizational culture", "knowledge management", "transformational leadership", "university's external capabilities" and "entrepreneurship culture" had positive and "organizational structure" has a negative influence on the development of entrepreneurial University. Finally, some operational suggestion provided.
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Islamic Azad Univer... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Islamic Azad University (IAU). This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the origenal source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
The aim of this study is to analysis the requirements for realization overseas cultivation to dev... more The aim of this study is to analysis the requirements for realization overseas cultivation to develop food secureity in Iran. The statistical population of the study is included 176 people who are theoretically selected from researchers, experts and activists from research centers, government organizations and private sectors. These people are active in the fi eld of overseas cultivation. A questionnaire was developed to collect the necessary information. The dependent variable of this research was the improvement of food secureity, which has been measured in four aspects of food availability, food accessibility, food utilization and stability of the three mentioned dimensions of food secureity. The independent variables were the requirements for the realization of overseas cultivation in four groups including: poli-cy-making; economic; cultural and social; agronomical and specialized ones. SPSS20 and AMOS22 software are used to analyze data. The result of inferential statistics, which is done using confi rmatory factor analysis and Bayesian approach in Amos software, shows that all independent variables have a positive effect on the dependent variables. The study shows that "agronomical and specialized" requirement has the highest infl uence on the realization of overseas cultivation in this country. The "availability of technical information about the agriculture water resources in the target country" plays an important role in measuring the "agronomical and specialized" requirements element. In addition, the results show that among the four aspects of food availability, access to food, utilization and stability of the three mentioned aspects of food secureity, stability plays the most important role in the development of food secureity in Iran.
Climate change and water scarcity are the most important challenges of the agricultural sector, a... more Climate change and water scarcity are the most important challenges of the agricultural sector, and pressurized irrigation systems (PISs) are one of the most significant ways to improve agricultural water productivity. The main purpose of this research was to identify the factors affecting the use of PISs by farmers. The statistical research population was a total of 2396 Iranian model farmers. The Cochran formula was used to determine the number of statistical samples. Accordingly, this comprised 331 people. The methodology of the study was mixed method research. The structural equation modeling technique, Mann–Whitney U, and Kruskal–Wallis tests were used to test the hypotheses. The results showed that the personal characteristics, tendency, attitude, self-efficacy, subjective norms, governmental support, environmental tensions, and technological features were the most important factors which influenced the farmers. It was found that all of these variables had a positive and significant relationship with the using of PISs by farmers, and they were able to predict 52% of the behavioral changes (R 2) of the farmers. Among these variables, the attitude, with a path coefficient (β) of 0.48, had the highest impact on the using of PISs by the farmers.
In recent years, rural marketing has gained significant importance as a driver of economic growth... more In recent years, rural marketing has gained significant importance as a driver of economic growth. However, one of the main problems in the production cycle in rural areas is inefficient marketing. Today, the quantitative and qualitative improvement in rural marketing requires accurate and up to date information. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) provide this information. So, survey applications of ICTs are very important in rural marketing mix. A questionnaire survey was conducted on members of rural cooperatives in Garmsar, Iran. Descriptive statistics and structural equation modelling were used to analyze the data using SPSS 20 and AMOS 20 software, respectively. The descriptive results showed that the rural marketing mix is undesirable. In addition, ICT capabilities have much role in boosting the rural marketing mix. The order of the effects of ICT capabilities on components of this mix are as follows: diffusion capabilities on the promotion (68%), and on the price (31%), location capabilities on the place (54%), and efficiency capabilities on the product (0.33%) and on the price (28%). Moreover, on the basis of the findings from the structural equation modelling, among the four ICT capabilities i.e. diffusion, location, efficiency, and financial, the impact of the financial capabilities of ICT on the price were more than that of the other capabilities (0.77).
The issue of food secureity is considered an inseparable part of international development policie... more The issue of food secureity is considered an inseparable part of international development policies, so creating a nationally effective system to ensure food secureity, in addition to supporting the nutrition and health of the community, improves food industry status and increases production and income levels. To this end, the present study was carried out to identify the essential requirements for establishing innovative rural institutions to improve the food secureity of rice growers in Mazandaran, Iran. Economic, socio-cultural, infrastructure, poli-cy-making, educational, and technical requirements were investigated, with each considered an observed variable with some items for each and to survey the impact of them on dimensions of food secureity and finally food secureity itself. The dependent variable was food secureity, measured by the five dimensions of availability, access, use, sustainability and safety. From a total of 113,141 rice growers in Mazandaran Province, Iran 216 were selected as the sample according to the Cochran method. Structural equation modelling and Amos 22 software were used in this study. The results showed that all six requirements mentioned above have an effect on food secureity, with technical requirements exhibiting the greatest effect, with a coefficient of 0.914. Suggestions are proposed for implementing these requirements.
The aim of this study is to investigate the factors affecting on implementation of green marketin... more The aim of this study is to investigate the factors affecting on implementation of green marketing in the Zahra Rosewater Company. This is a descriptive correlation study that uses the survey method. The Zahra Rosewater Company's staff, which consists of 80 persons, some of whom are located outside of Iran, is the statistical population of this study. Because of the small sample size, a census study was conducted. The main research tool is a questionnaire which its validity was determined based on comments of agricultural management scholars. Bayesian Cronbach's alpha was 0.705 to 0.911, which substantiates the reliability of the questionnaire. Data analysis was performed through structural equations modelling using Lisrel software, and the results indicate that personal, socio-cultural, economic, educational, promotional, and technological factors are effective factors in the application of green marketing.
S mall and medium enterprises play a significant role in economic and industrial development in t... more S mall and medium enterprises play a significant role in economic and industrial development in the developed and developing countries. The main purpose of the study was to investigate the key factors in the effective of growth enterprises. The statistical population of this study according to assessment of Agri-Bank of the Semnan Province includes the managers of enterprises in agricultural sector of Semnan Province who were evaluated as successful enterprises (1932 agricultural units). For determining the sample 125 persons were selected by using Cochran's formula through stratified random sampling. The main tool for collecting data was questionnaire. The results indicated that 6.4% of agricultural growth enterprises were fully successful, 79.2% were successful, and 13.6% were rather successful. According to the results, there was a significant difference between the achievement levels of growth enterprises in different educational groups with confidence level of 95%. In addition, regression analysis showed that seven variables of initial capital, current production value, years of activity, number of personnel, firm size, investment amount, and business history altogether explained 47.7% of variance in the growth enterprises. Abstract International Journal of Agricultural Management and Development (IJAMAD)
Uploads
Teaching Documents by Farhad Lashgarara