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Examining the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) and expenses spent on food preparation on nutritional intake has always been one of the critical concerns for policymakers. This study aims to investigate the association between household food expenditure as well as SES and dietary nutrient intake in Kermanshah, Iran.

In this cross-sectional study, households were randomly selected from different strict in Kermanshah, Iran. Data were collected with an SES questionnaire, a demographic data collection form, a weekly food purchase checklist and a food record. The authors performed the analysis of covariance to determine the relationship of dietary nutrient intake of study participants across quintile categories of SES and total food expenses per day.

Out of 125 households, 119 households including 401 people finished the study. A significant association was observed between higher SES and higher intake of vitamin B2 (p-value = 0.03). Moreover, the household members at the top level of total food expenses per day had significantly greater dietary nutrient intake of energy (p < 0.001), potassium (p < 0.001), magnesium (p < 0.001), calcium (p < 0.001), zinc (p < 0.001), vitamin B2 (p < 0.001), B6 (p < 0.001), B12 (p = 0.002) and vitamin C (p = 0.04).

In our study, higher dietary nutrient intake was observed in the household members at the highest level of total food expenses daily as well as SES. Therefore, governments and policymakers should pay basic attention to optimizing food costs and improving the economic status of people.

One of the concepts most commonly evoked in order to characterize and explain the zig-zag trajectory of political dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the “middle class.” Yet there is no scholarly consensus on a fundamental approach to identification and measurement of the middle class. Rather, the category of the middle class is both a category of analysis – long debated within social theory – as well as a category of practice – routinely deployed in political behavior and social distinction. In order to better conceptualize and understand the formation and role of Iran's middle classes in the country's sociopolitical dynamics, theories of class formation in the global South should be rearticulated away from a reified notion of the middle class as a transhistorical subject. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, internal debates over the role of Iran's middle classes in the country's recent political history are assessed and data from the 2016 Iran Social Survey is used to test a long-standing demographic assumption on the class dynamics of electoral behavior. Second, the tradition of theorizing the social power of middle classes is reassessed, drawing on the growing scholarly attention to the heterogenous origins and differentiated internal composition of middle classes across the global South. Third, a typology is proposed of four middle classes across the twentieth century shaped by varying state attempts at “catch-up” development. These types are then applied in a revisionist telling of the making and unmaking of middle classes in postrevolutionary Iran. Finally, implications of this framework beyond Iran are sketched out for global waves of protest in the twenty-first century.

This chapter assists in Iran’s start-ups swift internationalisation from the onset. Indeed, it sheds in-depth qualitative and quantitative insights into analysing the propelling factors towards entrepreneurial internationalisation. To accomplish this feat, a mixed method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), Fuzzy-Delphi (FD) and Fuzzy-DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) – ISM (Interpretive Structural Modelling) – MICMAC (Matrix-based Multiplication Applied to a Classification) (FDIM), along with a multi-scenario analysis have innovatively been applied. As a result, entrepreneur characteristics and an accessible qualified workforce, even in foreign countries, are the most prominent drivers. Most probably, the institutional voids, interconnected benchmarking and the advent of new disruptive technologies form the independent factors which can sharply influence the whole system, particularly the entrepreneur characteristics as a dependent one. Moreover, social media, customer orientation and the domestic market cover autonomous drivers, which can moderately be affected or influence the abovementioned factors.

The purpose of this study is to investigate important factors that help explain customer willingness to adopt mobile banking (M-banking). To this end, the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) was applied and to more accurately predict customer behavioral intentions, it was attempted to extend it.

The research data were collected from 396 customers of Iranian private banks who had the experience of using M-banking. The structural equation modeling technique was used to test the research hypotheses.

Findings suggest that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, habit, hedonic motivation, perceived value and trialability are endorsed as proponents of M-banking adoption intention. On the other hand, M-banking adoption intention has also had a significant positive effect on actual use behavior and word-of-mouth (WOM). WOM has also influenced actual use behavior and mediated the relationship between M-banking adoption intention and actual use behavior.

The present study focuses on private banks, therefore, although it is sufficient, it is limited to private cases. This study contributes to the literature on M-banking services and actual use behavior. By appropriately focusing on M-banking adoption intention and the service quality provided, banks can strengthen their relationships with customers, thereby stimulating actual customer behavior such as actual use behavior and WOM.

From theoretical and managerial aspects, this study has particular value for the literature on M-services’ intention in general and banking in particular. The present study provides a conceptual framework for M-banking adoption intention, which could be used in M-banking services. In addition, this study sought to extend UTAUT2 and to examine the mediating role of WOM in actual use behavior motivation as well.

International collaboration is a crucial requirement of entrepreneurship, particularly in developing emerging economies. This collaboration seems so necessary in the food industry as a major contributor to environmental, social and economic problems. This paper aims to identify, analyse the influential network relationship and prioritise the key success factors (KSFs) of international collaboration formation in the entrepreneurial food industry with a case study on Iran's emerging economy.

To identify a list of KSFs, a qualitative method, literature review, is initially used. A quantitative method, fuzzy-Delphi, then is employed to finalise the main KSFs based on the entrepreneurial food industry experts' opinion. To analyse the causal relationship, and prioritise the KSFs, a fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL)-analytic network process (ANP) methodology, i.e. FDANP, is applied. At the first stage, the cause–effect diagram of KSFs is extracted using fuzzy DEMATEL and then, the KSFs weights and priorities are evaluated using a fuzzy ANP.

The results illustrate that the characteristics of effective development workers are the leading dimension of a successful international collaboration that directly affects other dimensions. On the other hand, increased marketing and trading is the most important KSF that is directly related to international entrepreneurial collaboration team capabilities and professionalism. The leading and casual role of team members also plays a vital role in strategic and communication issues affecting the collaboration success, e.g. market research and new product development. Availability of financial resources and the ability of partners in continuous financing is also a crucial and required factor for a successful collaboration.

Using an extensive review of the literature to extract the KSFs of international entrepreneurial collaboration and finalising them using a fuzzy-Delphi method and examining the cause-effect relations between them, as well as prioritising the KSFs are the main contributions of this paper.

The associations between legume consumption and cardiovascular events (CVEs) have extensively been studied. However, there are few studies that considered longitudinal association between legume consumption (with repeated measurements across time) and CVEs in low-income countries where legume consumption is lower than the Western countries. The authors aimed to investigate the long-term longitudinal relationship between soybean, non-soybean and overall legume consumption and CVEs using repeated measures of legumes and time-varying confounders in a cohort study of the general population.

The current study was performed within the framework of the Isfahan cohort study among 5,432 healthy participants. The participants were followed-up for fatal and non-fatal myocardial infarction, unstable angina, fatal and non-fatal stroke and sudden cardiac death for 13 years. Dietary intake was evaluated using a validated food frequency questionnaire in 2001, 2007 and 2013. The hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for CVEs between categories of soybean, non-soybean and overall legumes intake were examined using marginal Cox's regression analysis.

Long-term consumptions of overall legumes more than three times per week and non-soybean three times or more per week compared with those who had less than once a week were associated with 19.5% (HR = 0.805, 95% CI: 0.650,0.998; p < 0.048) and a 18.5% (HR = 0.815, 95% CI: 0.673, 0.988; p < 0.037) lower risk of CVEs in the general population, respectively. However, our findings revealed no significant reduction in CVEs following a higher intake of soybeans.

In the long run, even modest consumption of legumes, but not soybeans alone, can be effective to reduce CVEs risk in a low-income population. Further studies are warranted to confirm our results in other populations, examine the associations by the type of cardiovascular events and determine any possible threshold effects in this regard.

This paper aims to investigate Supply Chain (SC) Performance Measurement Systems (PMSs) (SCPMSs) that are suitable and applicable to evaluate SC performance during unexpected events such as global pandemics. Furthermore, the contribution of Industry 4.0 Disruptive Technologies (IDTs) to implement SCPMSs during such Black Swan events is investigated in this study.

The research methodology is based upon a novel qualitative and quantitative mixed-method. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was initially employed to identify two complete lists of SCPMSs and IDTs. Then, a novel Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Hesitant-Fuzzy (IVIHF)-Delphi method was firstly developed in this paper to screen the extracted SCPMSs. Afterward, the Propriety, Economic, Acceptable, Resource, Legal (PEARL) indicator of the Hanlon method was innovatively applied to prioritize the identified IDTs for each finalized SCPMS.

Two high-score SCPMSs including the SC operations reference (SCOR) model and sustainable SCPMS were recommended to improve measuring the performance of the pharmaceutical SC of emerging economies such as Iran in which the societal, biological and economic issues were undeniable, particularly during unexpected events. Employing nine IDTs such as simulation, big data analytics, cloud technologies, etc., would facilitate implementing sustainable SCPMS from distinct perspectives.

This is one of the first papers to provide in-depth insights into determining the priority of contribution of IDTs in applying different SCPMSs during global pandemics. Proposing a novel multi-layer mixed-methodology involving SLR, IVIHF-Delphi, and the PEARL indicator of the Hanlon method is another originality offered by this paper.

Developing graduate students' academic writing has been a major concern for many scholars over the past few years. Existing literature on the challenges of thesis writing has not focused on master's students in English language teaching (ELT). Data on the challenges have been mainly gathered from the theses and focused on the structure and genre requirements. Few available studies have investigated such challenges through the lens of supervisors in an international context. Knowledge about the factors hindering the thesis writing process of non-native MA students in English from the supervisors' perspectives is scarce. This study attempts to fill these gaps by answering this question: From supervisors' perspectives, what factors hinder the thesis writing process of non-native MA students?

Thirty supervisors from state and private universities across Iran voluntarily participated in this qualitative study. Drawing upon teachers' diaries and semi-structured interviews, the authors identified major factors negatively influencing the thesis work of master's students. Data were transferred into NVivo 10 and analyzed thematically following Colaizzi's method.

The study found that factors constraining students' writing were (1) students' lack of effort, (2) students' lack of a strategy for writing, (3) students' lack of autonomy and (4) students' absence of voice.

The authors discuss the practical implications of these factors for different stakeholders. There is a growing interest in postgraduate students' thesis writing processes. Surprisingly, no research exists on supervisors' perceptions of factors that constrain the thesis writing process of non-native English master's students.

The purpose of this study paper is to identify and prioritize the factors affecting the knowledge flow in high-tech industries.

This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey in terms of data collection method. This research has been done in a qualitative–quantitative method. In the qualitative part, due to the nature of the data in this study, expert interviews have been used. The sample studied in this research includes 35 managers and expert professors with experience in the field of knowledge management working in universities and high-tech industries who have been selected by the method of snowball. In the quantitative part, the questionnaire tool and DANP multivariate decision-making method have been used.

In this study, a multicriteria decision-making technique using a combination of DEMATEL and ANP (DANP) was used to identify and prioritize the factors affecting the knowledge flow in high-tech industries. In this study, the factors affecting the knowledge flow, including 8 main factors and 31 subfactors, were selected. Human resources, organizational structure, organizational culture, knowledge communication, knowledge management tools, knowledge characteristics, laws, policies and regulations and financial resources were effective in improving knowledge flow, respectively.

By studying the research, it was found that the study area is limited, and the previous work has remained at the level of documentation and little practical use has been done. In previous research, the discussion of knowledge flow has not been very open, and doing incomplete work causes limited experiences and increases cost and time wastage, and parallel work may also occur. Therefore, to complete the knowledge management circle and fully achieve the research objectives, as well as to make available and transfer the experiences of people working in this field and also to save time and reduce costs, the contents and factors of previous models have been counted. It is designed for high-tech industries, a model for the flow of knowledge.