Referencing: aren’t you doing it wrong?

I was reading a literature review paper of Knowledge Management by Kakabadse (link to pdf on emerald)  but was stopped by the following passage:

Is it just me or it really implies that Plato said all those things in 1953?

Apart from this minor flaw (and I’m not sure if it’s even a flaw), this was a very good review.

Pop Management in Iran

Always heart breaking to see a group of intelligent people do something less-than-intelligent. Take a look: a typical workshop on “Entrepreneurial Management” by people who in Iran are to be -by no standards- considered typical. These are very respeceted professionals yet you can see the very clearly from the structure of the workshop that it is based on the “business plan approach” to teaching entrepreneurship which is now on the verge of being mainstreamly obsolete.

They did this last year and I was hoping there would be something from Sarasvathy’s Effectuation (here & here) in this workshop. A dream deferred till next year.

Kjetil Selvik on Iranian Definition of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the heart of capitalism and in this sense entrepreneurs can be defined as economic agents who care about their interests. The majority of them can be classified under “greedy business men who have bright ideas for economic activity”.

In 1979 Iranian revolution fruited in an Islamic republic which apart from everything else had many strong beliefs about economy. In Islamic view of economy greed and looking for ones own interests are not acceptable. “Unfair Transactions” are forbidden in various parts of Quran and “those who charge high prices” are presented on par with murderers and deniers of Allah.

As a result in the 80s many Entrepreneurs were expelled from the country. Their Factories closed and their bank acounts and their bank acounts and wealth seized by the order of law. Iran as a country run under the rule of Islam has a centrally planned economy. Many prices are fixed by law and the one who increases the price faces a severe penalty.

Having said all that, one might think life is very hard for Iranian Entrepreneurs. But he/she will probably be surprised at how Iranian Entrepreneurs actually changed the meaning of Entrepreneur and Capitalists into a mild and lovable archetype.

If you want to know more about this you can read this article (The Rise and Newfound Legitimacy of Iran’s Industrial Bourgeoisie) by Kjetil Selvik. The picture that Kjetil illustrates of Iranian business environment is very close to reality. His paper is without a doubt one of the best papers and certainly an essential reading on Iranian Economy.

Harvard Maps Iranian Blogsphere

A while ago, I stumbled upon a fascinating project on Berkman’s center for cyber law at Harvard. Using automatic content analysis they have compiled a map of Iranian blogsphere. There is a glimpse of what the visualised 3D map looks like at it looks great. See for yourselves:

As you can see seven Categories (networks of blogs) are identifiable on the map and the relative position of these shows how these networks relate to one another. for example “reformist politics” is neighboring “Secular/expatriate” and, as you might expect, religious youth” is close to “Twelvers” and “concervative politics”. The two red dots in the low-center are former-president Khatami and now-president Ahmadinejad. The position of these two are especially interesting in the map. Again as expected politicians tend to stay away from the noise and stick somewhere in the middle.

What would be interesting to see is though if Harvard repeated this study in time periods and then studied the trend that Iranian bloggers follow. An Iranian-blogger life-cycle of the mind if you will. I suspect it will reveal a movement from the twelver network to secular/expatriot. Ofcourse all of these networks have some dedicated and non-moving Citizens who would not change parties but a certain number (mostly youth I suspect)  will eventually read some article about evolution and new scientific discoveries and turn into seculars. I have no Idea about the speed in which this movement might happen and I also have no guess about other directions that the blogs from other networks might move in the blogsphere. Hope John Kelly and Bruce Etling continue their work on Iranian bloggers. You can download their worthy paper here.