Understanding the Key Mindsets of Iranian Economic Policy Actors in the Use of Big Data

The explosive growth of data generation in the era of information and communication has led to the formation of a new concept called big data. Big data has created exciting and irreplaceable opportunities in different fields, one of the most important users of big data are businesses, but there have always been challenges and various regulatory disorders in the exploitation of big data by businesses in Iran. One of the most important reasons for these regulatory disorders is the existence of disagreements and different interpretations among policy actors regarding some key issues in this field. The present research, using the Q methodology, after identifying the disputed issues and interviewing 16 experts in this field who were selected by the purposeful sampling method, has dealt with the typology and categorization of the mindsets among the policy actors in this field. The results of this research show that there are 6 types of mentalities in facing the application of big data in the economic environment of the country: “authoritarians”, “fans of a competitive rule-based economy”, “supporters of an open self-regulating economy”, “moderate regulators”, “confused” and “supporters of centralized, non-security decision-making" that each of them interprets the issues in this field from their own point of view. Finally, by examining and analyzing “agreed expressions” and “differentiating expressions”, recommendations for effective policy making in this field have been presented.