مجله آموزش عالی ایران
سال ششم شماره 1 (پیاپی 21، زمستان 1392)

Higher education in contemporary society is drawn towards occupationalism/vocationalism and professionalism by two opposite tendencies. This article, with distinguishing two concepts of occupation and profession, studies the roots of occupationalism and professionalism in modern era and their relations to higher education. After this conceptual review, the effects of changes in the final decades of the twentieth century on shaping the two phenomena of new occupationalism/ new vocationalism and new professionalism are examined. In knowledge society and with forming of knowledge-based employment, professionalism or normative and communicative natures of professionals with their jobs have been transformed and these transformations resulted to the emergence of new professionalism. This article wishes to inquiry different dimensions of new professionalism and to study consequences of this concept for social organization and cognitive content of professions in close future. Therefore, concepts of new professionalism and politics of professionalism and its relevant models, namely the ecological model of professionalism, transformative professionalism, democratic professionalism and civic professionalism, are set forth. Finally, a four-aspect model of professionalism with dimensions of academic professionalism, critical professionalism, market and policy professionalism, and public professionalism is discussed.The conclusion of the paper has focused on the importance of new professionalism as opposed to new vocationalism. Under the influences of new necessities of economic globalization, challenges and needs of labor market, formation of knowledge-based economy, increasing the rate of unemployment and development of Post-Fordism economy, new vocationalism threatens education with growth of mechanical procedures, utilitarianism, mere quantificationism, and makes educated persons face the development of uncritical, one-dimensional approach and technicianism and the result is forgetting science and profession as a set of personal, inter-personal, social and political values. This article assumed it necessary for the educational plans and curriculums to reform at different level of education including higher education in the line of combination of general education with emphasis on humanistic and civic values and vocational education with emphasis on job values responding to multiply needs including balance-making between work and life, culture and knowledge. The final section of this article includes specific strategies for developing new professionalism especially in human sciences disciplines with a special focus on the promotion of relations between professionals and the publics.

Knowledge and technology can be transferred between universities and industry through different channels. The main objective of this paper was to investigate the relationship between universities and industry with an emphasis on the importance of sectoral characteristics. The analyses in this paper are based on original data collected by two related questionnaires, one aimed at university researchers and one at industry researchers, from July 2012 to January 2013, implementing logistic binary regression model. The results show a significant difference in the importance of different channels of knowledge transfer. In general, the results indicate that the scientific publications, patents, intellectual property and spin-offs are more important forms of knowledge transfer between university and industry in the chemical and petrochemical sector. Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology sectors use all channels with the exception of scientific publications to transfer knowledge. Machinery and basic metal products sector and the sectors related to mechanical engineering place great importance on intellectual property, patents and spin-offs. Electrical and telecommunications equipment sectors use only participation in conferences to transfer knowledge from university and the use of knowledge transfer channels by the food industry is inexplicable.

Solving problematic issues in an effective communication among universities and industries has encouraged researchers to study the problem and develop solutions for it. Presented solutions fall into one of the three approach categories which are pragmatic, organ-based, and nature-based. Since all these approaches are necessary for the flow of knowledge from university to industry, a successful solution must support all three approaches on one hand, and be based on knowledge management solutions on the other hand. In this paper first ten different models of knowledge flow which have been previously developed for communication between university and industry are compared. The comparison of the results show that none of the current knowledge flow models can consider all the approaches. Hence, in this paper, first, a conceptual framework for knowledge flow modeling is presented through which a comprehensive view of knowledge flow modeling can be developed. This model is a six by six matrix. The rows of the matrix are the views of inter-organization, organization, group, role, individual, and machine. The columns are the aspects of why, what, who, how, when and where. Next, using this framework a knowledge flow model for communication between university and industry is designed. This model is based on market knowledge and includes various university and industry organs along with another organ to monitor and support the knowledge flow. In this model twenty seven types of knowledge flow have been clarified, the occurrence of each implies a knowledge transaction. The two sides of the transaction are a seller and a buyer of knowledge package who, depending on the manner by which knowledge flow begins, participate in a tender or an auction.

Investment in education is a key factor in the economic development process.. Human capital is required to be provided with educational activities. On the one hand, educational investment enhances human capabilities, and on the other hand, the labor force is enabled to use the new technology for production and thus the way is paved for the country's economic growth and development.In this study, we surveyed the effect of investment in education on economic growth in developing countries (Iran, Bulgaria, Peru, Romania, Thailand, turkey, Tunisia, Malaysia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico) with using panel data selection during the period1998-2010.The results indicate that the effect of investment on economic growth is positive and significant in selected developing countries. Also, low training costs and thus ignoring the impact of education and training of skilled manpower are the most important factors of low levels of economic growth in developing countries. Meanwhile, it is worth considering that the growing population of young people in developing countries plus the need for these countries to generate growth and increase production requires a great attention to the level and quality of education which can be enhanced through increased training costs.

This research deals with the impacts of the organizational culture of educational departments on postgraduate students’ conformity with scientific ethics. At first having applied socio-cognitive theory, a model was constructed to explain the basic mechanisms influential on the process of conformity with scientific ethics in educational departments and then using survey method and probability of proportional sampling (PPS) data was collected. The findings indicate that firstly, all studied universities are to some extent suffering from low organizational culture. Secondly, organizational culture has direct impact on postgraduate students’ conformity with scientific ethics, i.e. the rate of conformity with scientific ethics heightens with an increase in desirability level of the departments’ organizational culture. Also the Regression equation with regard to considered variables succeeded in explaining 28 percent of dependent variable variance.

Given the importance of social interaction, knowledge management and performance, this study is to survey the effects of internal and external social interaction on the performance of university faculty members, with an emphasis on the mediating role of knowledge management. All 130 faculty members of Persian Gulf University of Bushehr took part in this research. 92 questionnaires were distributed, 64 of which were returned and analyzed by structural equation modeling to help presented hypotheses being tested. The results showed that internal trust and internal and external communication have positive and significant effect on knowledge management at the university. Moreover, knowledge management has a positive and significant effect on the performance of faculty members.

This study was to investigate the quality of higher education in the University of Shiraz. The study was a descriptive one which random sampled 240 of graduate students 180 of whom were doing their Master’s and 30 were PhD candidates. The implemented questionnaires was the one used by Baloochzahi (1389) and also based on Servqual theory with a reliability 0.90 computed by Cronbach Alpha. Its validity was also tested by content analysis method. The quality of complementary education at the University of Shiraz was assessed in five dimension, namely, tangibility; reliability; responsibility; assurance and empathy. The significant findings are as follows: (1) the quality of complementary education is lower than expected in graduate and postgraduate levels as the tangibility and empathy means were higher compared to the other dimensions. (2) A meaningful difference was noticed between the students of humanities and the rest of participants. Humanity students acknowledged the quality of services as higher and more appealing and this was very distinct regarding empathy. The distinction was also noticed between the faculties, as students of law and students of agriculture reported the most and the least satisfaction respectively. It is worth mentioning that no meaningful difference was noticed between males and females or between students doing their Master’s and PhD candidates regarding how they viewed the quality of service.