A Conceptual Model to Explain the Readiness of Iranian Commercial Banks towards Islamic Banking Implementation: Using Grounded Theory Strategy

Today, banking is considered as the beating heart and vital artery of economy; in other words, banking sector is the most important economic, monetary and financial entity. On the other hand, in Islamic economics system, this vital role has been entrusted to Islamic banking system. The process of establishing Islamic banking in Iran’s economy after more than three decades of passing the Interest-Free Banking Operation Law which despite its defects, failed to execute completely and successfully. Accordingly, the current research based on a fundamental and comprehensive approach has investigated and presented a conceptual model to explain Iranian commercial banks in order to implement Islamic banking in the economy of Iran. For this purpose, the exploratory mixed approach was used. On this basis, in the qualitative phase the grounded theory strategy encompasses open coding, axial coding and selective coding and also the basic framework of this strategy was applied to achieve the extracted research model. Then, in the quantitative phase, the descriptive survey method was used to analysis and explain the proposed model. The results derived from this research have been presented in the form a confirmed and fitted model including six main categories and forty-three subcategories.