Shadi Farahzadi and Mohammad Rahmati
The purpose of this study is to determine why female labor force participation in Iran has been less than 20 percent.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to determine why female labor force participation in Iran has been less than 20 percent.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors estimate a structural dynamic matching model of female participation using individual panel data in Iran. The study incorporates many factors such as wage, child cost, education, spouse employment and job market search parameters.
Findings
The study finds that gender discrimination in job finding has the biggest effect in reducing the rate of women's participation. If all market differences disappear, the female participation rate will increase by 12 percentage points to almost 27 percent, which is still much lower than that of developed countries with the average of 60 percent.
Originality/value
This study provides the first structural search model using a developing country's microdata to study female labor participation.
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Mohammad Hossein Rahmati and Mohammad Reza Jalilvand
Current models of organizational excellence are appropriate for the private organizations. It is evident that if an appropriate model is not adopted, the process of excellence in…
Abstract
Purpose
Current models of organizational excellence are appropriate for the private organizations. It is evident that if an appropriate model is not adopted, the process of excellence in the organizations fails and some dimensions of the organization get affected by unpredictable damages. This research aims to identify an appropriate excellence model for public organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
First, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify the excellence criteria and models. Second, the models were through an expert-oriented questionnaire, analyzed by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique. Participants were experts in the two domains of excellence models and public sector management. A sample of 15 experts was selected using purposive sampling. In order to emphasize on reliability, 10 questionnaires were adopted for analysis.
Findings
The findings showed that the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) model is the most appropriate model for excellence measurement in the public organizations based on the five selected indices.
Originality/value
The identification of a model for measuring organizational excellence for public sector can significantly contribute to existing literature on excellence measurement.
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Mahdi Vesal, Ali Gohary and Mohammad H. Rahmati
This paper aims to examine the impacts of financial and nonfinancial incentives on the development of employee work motivation and knowledge sharing in the postpandemic…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the impacts of financial and nonfinancial incentives on the development of employee work motivation and knowledge sharing in the postpandemic environment. The paper further investigates the role of transformational leadership as a moderator in enhancing the relationship between work motivation and knowledge sharing.
Design/methodology/approach
Adopting a quantitative approach, the study uses data collected from multiple informants, specifically senior managers, in Nepalese manufacturing and service business-to-business (B2B) firms.
Findings
Contrary to prior research, the results reveal that nonfinancial incentives have a stronger impact on work motivation in the postpandemic era. This enhanced work motivation, in turn, contributes to knowledge sharing, with transformational leadership further strengthening the relationship.
Practical implications
The findings suggest that B2B firms should consider moving toward leveraging nonfinancial incentives to motivate employees to develop knowledge sharing initiatives, especially in challenging circumstances such as those experienced in the postpandemic era. In addition, it is recommended that chief executive officers adopt a transformational leadership style to facilitate effective knowledge sharing within their firms.
Originality/value
In a developing economy and amid the challenges of the global pandemic, there has been limited research exploring the possible effects that financial and nonfinancial incentives could have on work motivation and knowledge sharing. This research bridges this gap by providing a fresh perspective on work motivation and knowledge management in B2B firms, contributing novel insights to the literature.
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Kowsar Yousefi and Ali Taiebnia
Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial…
Abstract
Purpose
Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial for developing ones who already suffer from income inequalities and lack of competency. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses an administrative data from the Iran's Social Security Organization (ISSO) that provides insurance to workers entitled to the Labor Law of Iran. The data contain more than 7,000,000 workers. The authors assess heterogeneous impact of the first wave of the pandemic by firms' size and average payment.
Findings
The authors’ estimation results indicate that, following the initiation of the pandemic, the workers whose corresponding firms are smaller, overall, are more prone to the pandemic and are more likely to submit a request for unemployment benefits. However, the relation is neither homogeneous across sectors nor linear among micro-sized firms. Few sectors indicate a positive relationship between size and likelihood of request submission, including cultural activity, shoemaking and clothing sectors. Besides the size, the authors investigate whether pay grades could explain the probability of becoming unemployed after the pandemic. Results show that workers whose corresponding firms pay less are more likely to submit a request. This is robust within different sectors.
Research limitations/implications
The ISSO dataset is not a panel, so the authors cannot employ methods of causal inferences. The authors’ results should be seen as correlation; however, due to exogeneity and sharpness of the pandemic the result infers to some degree of causality. The data does not cover the informal sector, so the estimates are at lower boundary.
Originality/value
Administrative data on unemployment benefits during COVID-19 show that the pandemic interferes with competition by forcing low-paid workers and small firms to exit the market. This is an alarm for the competition in every economy, specially developing ones.
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Reza Dadsetani, Ghanbar Ali Sheikhzadeh, Mohammad Reza Hajmohammadi and Mohammad Reza Safaei
Electronic components’ efficiency is the cornerstone of technology progress. The cooling process used for electronic components plays a main role in their performance. Embedded…
Abstract
Purpose
Electronic components’ efficiency is the cornerstone of technology progress. The cooling process used for electronic components plays a main role in their performance. Embedded high-conductivity material and provided microchannel heat sink are two common cooling methods. The former is expensive to implement while the latter needs micro-pump, which consumes energy to circulate the flow. The aim of this study is providing a new configuration and method for improving the performance of electronic components.
Design/methodology/approach
To manage these challenges and improve the cooling efficiency, a novel method named Hybrid is presented here. Each method's performance has been investigated, and the results are widely compared with others. Considering the micro-pump power, the supply of the microchannel flow and the thermal conductivity ratio (thermal conductivity ratio is defined as the ratio of thermal conductivity of high thermal conductivity material to the thermal conductivity of base solid), the maximum disk temperature of each method was evaluated and compared to others.
Findings
The results indicated that the Hybrid method can reduce the maximum disk temperature up to 90 per cent compared to the embedded high thermal conductivity at the same thermal conductivity ratio. Moreover, the Hybrid method further reduces the maximum disk temperature up to 75 per cent compared to the microchannel, at equivalent power consumption.
Originality/value
The information in this research is presented in such a way that designers can choose the desired composition, the limited amount of consumed energy and the high temperature of the component. According to the study of radial-hybrid configuration, the different ratio of microchannel and materials with a high thermal conductivity coefficient in the constant cooling volume was investigated. The goal of the investigation was to decrease the maximum temperature of a plate on constant energy consumption. This aim has been obtained in the radial-hybrid configuration.
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Kamel Hooman, Mohammad Reza Safaei, Hussein Togun and Mahidzal Dahari
In this study, closed-form solutions are presented to investigate thermohydraulics of liquid films in a rotating heat pipe. The film thickness is expressed as a function of flow…
Abstract
Purpose
In this study, closed-form solutions are presented to investigate thermohydraulics of liquid films in a rotating heat pipe. The film thickness is expressed as a function of flow rate.
Design/methodology/approach
Further, sensitivity of both film thickness and flow rate to the length of the rotating heat pipe can now be investigated using the explicit expressions presented here.
Findings
To make it easier for practical application, an approximate solution is presented on top of the exact solution.
Originality/value
Both approximate and exact solutions are then applied to note that results are in good agreement when compared to those available in the literature.
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Mojtaba Sepehrnia, Hossein Khorasanizadeh and Mohammad Behshad Shafii
This paper aims to study the thermal and thermo-hydraulic performances of ferro-nanofluid flow in a three-dimensional trapezoidal microchannel heat sink (TMCHS) under uniform heat…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to study the thermal and thermo-hydraulic performances of ferro-nanofluid flow in a three-dimensional trapezoidal microchannel heat sink (TMCHS) under uniform heat flux and magnetic fields.
Design/methodology/approach
To investigate the effect of direction of Lorentz force the magnetic field has been applied: transversely in the x direction (Case I);transversely in the y direction (Case II); and parallel in the z direction (Case III). The three-dimensional governing equations with the associated boundary conditions for ferro-nanofluid flow and heat transfer have been solved by using an element-based finite volume method. The coupled algorithm has been used to solve the velocity and pressure fields. The convergence is reached when the accuracy of solutions attains 10–6 for the continuity and momentum equations and 10–9 for the energy equation.
Findings
According to thermal indicators the Case III has the best performance, but according to performance evaluation criterion (PEC) the Case II is the best. The simulation results show by increasing the Hartmann number from 0 to 12, there is an increase for PEC between 845.01% and 2997.39%, for thermal resistance between 155.91% and 262.35% and ratio of the maximum electronic chip temperature difference to heat flux between 155.16% and 289.59%. Also, the best thermo-hydraulic performance occurs at Hartmann number of 12, pressure drop of 10 kPa and volume fraction of 2%.
Research limitations/implications
The embedded electronic chip on the base plate generates heat flux of 60 kW/m2. Simulations have been performed for ferro-nanofluid with volume fractions of 1%, 2% and 3%, pressure drops of 10, 20 and 30 kPa and Hartmann numbers of 0, 3, 6, 9 and 12.
Practical implications
The authors obtained interesting results, which can be used as a design tool for magnetohydrodynamics micro pumps, microelectronic devices, micro heat exchanger and micro scale cooling systems.
Originality/value
Review of the literature indicated that there has been no study on the effects of magnetic field on thermal and thermo-hydraulic performances of ferro-nanofluid flow in a TMCHS, so far. In this three dimensional study, flow of ferro-nanofluid through a trapezoidal heat sink with five trapezoidal microchannels has been considered. In all of previous studies, in which the effect of magnetic field has been investigated, the magnetic field has been applied only in one direction. So as another innovation of the present research, the effect of applying magnetic field direction (transverse and parallel) on thermo-hydraulic behavior of TMCHS is investigated.
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Mohammad Yavari, Mohammad Mousavi-Saleh and Armin Jabbarzadeh
A multi-objective mixed-integer linear program (MILP) model is developed to address this problem. The primary objective is to minimize the total restructuring cost, while the…
Abstract
Purpose
A multi-objective mixed-integer linear program (MILP) model is developed to address this problem. The primary objective is to minimize the total restructuring cost, while the secondary objective aims to enhance the customer service level. To tackle the NP-hard nature of the problem, the non-dominated sorted genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) and a hybrid NSGA-II with the ɛ-constraint method are employed. The hybrid method combines the strengths of the ɛ-constraint method with NSGA-II. Various performance metrics, including the number of Pareto solutions (NPS), normalized set coverage and spacing metrics, are utilized to compare the characteristics of the non-dominated fronts obtained by NSGA-II and the hybrid methods.
Design/methodology/approach
The Restructuring Facility Location Problem involves the closure, resizing or opening of a group of facilities and the assignment of customers to these selected facilities. The objective is to provide the required service to customers while minimizing the overall restructuring costs. This paper introduces a novel multi-objective model for hierarchical facilities called the Multi-Objective Restructuring Hierarchical Facility Location Problem (MO-RHFLP). The model specifically includes primary- and secondary-level facilities, with the primary facility offering broad coverage. In MO-RHFLP, customers within the coverage range of the primary facility can receive service from there.
Findings
The results demonstrate that the NSGA-II-based method performs well in terms of normalized set coverage and spacing metrics. However, the hybrid method outperforms NSGA-II in these aspects. Additionally, the hybrid method achieves a mutation in the NPS metric.
Originality/value
The present study, from three perspectives, has continued the way of the previous studies in restructuring channels. First, the multi-objective problem of restructuring the bi-level network executed in this study contains both levels of the network opening, closing and resizing. Taking a different perspective, the MO-RHFLP problem is introduced through the formulation of a multi-objective MILP model. This model serves as a framework for addressing the MO-RHFLP. By developing the hybrid ɛ-constraint method with NSGA-II, we solve the proposed problem.