The Solutions of Realizing Resistance Economy in Book Publishing Industry: Publishers' Perspective

U.S. sanctions on Iran were first imposed during the U.S.-Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981. The increase of these imposed sanctions in the recent years has given rise to discussion about resistance economy as a coping Strategy. The Resistance Economy doctrine is intended to make the Iranian economy resistant to all external economic shocks in the long term, including Western sanctions and global financial crises. The purpose of this study is to examine the strategies of realizing resistance economy in the field of book publishing from publishers’ perspective.

The content analysis method and survey research design were adopted for this study. The purpose of content analysis was to extract the components of resistance economy in field of book publishing industry and apply them in constructing the research instrument. The instrument for the data collection was a questionnaire which was consisted of 11 questions based of 5 Likert point. The population of the study was 252 active book publishers in the Isfahan city. All of the respective questionnaires had distributed randomly through simple random sampling among sample size of 148 publishers. Out of the 148 questionnaire, 97 were returned and completed. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS.

Based on the results obtained, majority of the respondents were male 74 percent followed by 24 percent female. Their median age was 42 years old. Findings revealed that book publishers are experiencing financial problems and challenges. The most important challenges from publishers’ point of view were insufficiency and expense of publishing materials, dependence on lucrative markets, lack of material capital, lack of participation of banks or investors in the field of book publishing and lack of study culture from their perspective. Based on the questionnaire results, the respondents provided suggestions on how overcome financial problems by applying resistance economy. They recommended that using strategies such as government support in form of facilitating and reforming the marketing system in book publishing industry, promotion of knowledge-based publishing industry, consumption management and maximizing use of material and human resources have a positive and significant impact on the realization of a resistance economy.

This is the first study that addressed realizing resistance economy in book publishing industry in Iran. Therefore, the results can be applied to improve book publishers’ situation. From the findings it can be concluded that, although some of the solutions presented in this study may require the collective action of publishers and external agents, some of them certainly require serious attention and actions from the government and relevant agencies to change the situation.