hassan danaeefard

This study aims to explore, understand, and classify the roles of policy entrepreneurs in public policy-making, providing a deeper understanding of this phenomenon from the perspectives of the study participants. A phenomenographical approach was adopted, with semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection. The sampling was purposive, employing maximum variation and snowball methods, with a sample sizse determined based on theoretical saturation, totaling twenty participants. Interviews were conducted with twenty individuals who had recently engaged in policy entrepreneurship through implementing policy innovations across eleven policy domains. The analysis revealed six descriptive categories of policy entrepreneurs' roles: "Concerned Actor," "Mentor," "Marketer," "Politician," "Behind-the-Scenes Actor," and "Observer," each categorized at the individual, policy network, and institutional levels. Based on these identified descriptive categories, an Outcome Space of the roles of policy entrepreneurs in public policy-making in Iran is presented to address the research question.

All public policies in governance scale, strategies in public administration, routines and procedures in operations need regulations for implementation. Although the law, policy, circulars, government decrees, and instructions all have a regulatory aspect, but in the literature of the state, regulations refer to the regulatory measures that the the government establish to implement the public policy. Evaluating the effectiveness of these regulators, whether applied in the public sector or for society is considered one of the important instruments of political and managerial decision-making in the political systems of different countries of the world. Regulatory impact assessment or regulatory effects analysis is a document that is compiled by the advisory groups of general policies in the government before the approval of a regulatory measure. Therefore, it can play an important role in debugging the past in the way the state works. The ultimate goal of this article is to understand what is, the importance and necessity of impact assessment, the stages of its implementation, and the challenges facing its implementation in the public sector of Iran.

Living poverty of citizens is one of the biggest challenges facing many governments around the world. Because its severity and continuity can endanger the political, social and economic life of countries. Many researches about poverty have been done in scientific and research circles, but so far no comprehensive research has been done to conceptualize policies, strategies and programs to reduce poverty in Iran. The final goal of this research was to outline the policies, strategies and programs of poverty alleviation in Iran based on a kind of qualitative research and in the light of qualitative data content analysis method in Iran. The time domain of the research is related to (the end of the war) 1368 and the geographical area of ​​Iran. The research findings show that three main policies (regulation, support and promotion) and six strategies and 21 programs can be used to eliminate poverty in Iran. The results of this research will be useful for policy makers and executive managers as well as other researchers.

This study has been conducted to explore, understand and categorize policy entrepreneurship to achieve a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The research strategy adopted was phenomenography, and the data collection instrument was the semi-structured interview. To select the participants, the maximum variation and snowball sampling methods were used. The sample size was determined through the principle of theoretical saturation, resulting in 20 participants. Consequently, 20 people were interviewed who had hands-on experience with policy entrepreneurship and their contributions to policy innovations in 11 policies. The results indicated that there exist six descriptive categories in policy entrepreneurship, namely "creating innovative ideas", "making the innovative idea understood", "promoting the innovative idea", "persuading the institutional structure", "mainstreaming based on the innovative idea", and "monitoring the implementation of innovative policy". Based on the identified descriptive categories, the outcome space of policy entrepreneurship was formed, and its hierarchical model was presented.

After approximately three decades of implementing population control and family planning policies, Iran's population policy underwent a significant reversal with the announcement of general population policies in 2014. This shift experienced many fluctuations, ultimately leading to a complete change marked by the enactment and implementation of the “Youthful Population and Family Protection Law” in 2021. This study aims to address the question: "Why and how did the national population policy in Iran change?" The study analyzes the policy change process using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), adopting a post-positivist philosophical orientation, a qualitative research paradigm, and a case study strategy. Utilizing this framework can help improve, strengthen, and address its shortcomings, contributing to the theoretical development of policy studies. The findings revealed the formation of two advocacy coalitions within Iran's population policy sphere: (a) the coalition of population control and family planning advocates, and (b) the coalition of population growth and childbearing advocates. Additionally, the policy shift from population control and family planning programs to the enactment and implementation of the Youthful Population and Family Protection Law can be attributed to the causal mechanisms of this framework, namely "policy-oriented learning," "external shocks," "internal shocks," and to a lesser extent, "negotiated agreements".  Policymakers should aim to improve their understanding of the policy-making process in Iran, recognizing the role and importance of coalitions, and draw lessons from both successful and un successful experiences in policy-making.

The conflict over the duality of individual originality or community originality has a long history in sociological literature. The acceptance of each of the two sides of this duality plays a decisive role in the quality of the next theorizations about the laws governing the society and the stages of its formation.  Considering the mainly philosophical background of this issue, the need to address this issue from the perspective of Islamic attitude and especially transcendental wisdom, as the most complete Islamic philosophical system, becomes clear. In the meantime, Allameh Tabatabaei by proposing the principle of employment, Professor Motahari by proposing the physical creation and spiritual survival of society and Professor Parsania by presenting an innovative argument about the existence of society have expanded the horizon of transcendental wisdom from purely philosophical issues to sociological issues. However, firstly, there are problems in these views and secondly, there is some kind of inconsistency between these views in the initial opinion. In this article, first, answers are provided to the problems raised in these views, and then an attempt is made to sum up all three views by expanding the implications of transcendental wisdom in the recognition of society. Then, the development of the implications of transcendental wisdom is dealt with for further analysis of the society and some of its implications are presented in this regard, which include: Explaining the essential movement of society, a new division of different types of societies, proving the real existence of all types of society and the true unity between all societies while distinguishing them. In addition, in this article, according to each section, comparative, argumentative and implication research methods have been used.

Although family organizations are usually on the sidelines of management research, they play a significant role in local and international economies. Therefore, in the last few decades, studies have focused on the differences between these organizations and conventional ones. One of these areas of attention is researching survival and organizational changes in these organizations. Due to their dual identity (family on the one hand and business on the other), family organizations face different change issues and have distinct characteristics that can prevent or promote changes.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

Previous research has addressed many issues and research questions about the different aspects of experiencing organizational change in family organizations. Specifically, the main research topics include the person-centered behaviors of the founders (such as their leadership style and entrepreneurial behaviors) alongside the specific features of these organizations (such as cultural differences). Another main focus of the literature has been explaining the distinct nature of family organizations, resulting in a middle-range theory about the dualistic nature of their identity, namely, the socioemotional wealth theory. Socioemotional wealth refers to financial aspects of the firm that meet the family's affective needs, such as identity, the ability to exercise family influence, and the perpetuation of the family dynasty. However, what is lacking in the literature is a more comprehensive look at how family organizations experience organizational changes. To answer this question, secondary data analysis, i.e., how previous studies have conceptualized organizational changes and its promoting and preventing factors in family organizations, would be a suitable path.

The current study tried to answer the research question by systematically reviewing the literature from 2000 to 2020. Unlike traditional narrative review, systematic review is repeatable and transparent. It provides a structured and documented approach to the literature selection and review process to reduce review bias. We followed the procedures and recommendations of some authoritative articles to conduct this review. Accordingly, the first step was determining clear and specific questions at the beginning of the study: “What approaches and theories are used in the conceptualization of change in family organizations?” and “What are the factors that promote or prevent change in family organizations?” The next step was doing an initial search and identifying related articles in 5 online databases (Google Scholar, Sage Publications, Science Direct, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley). We used two categories of keywords and logical operators (AND, OR) to perform the search. The search was conducted in September 2020 and only among sources published in English between 2000 and 2020. For the selection of articles, we set some inclusion and exclusion criteria, such as “the study should be empirical and being published in a peer-reviewed journal,” which were applied through software-aided control, referring to related sites, and reviewing the abstracts of the articles. By the end, 81 final articles were selected for this review. To extract data, we created an Excel file with columns related to the general characteristics of the articles and our research questions. During a back-and-forth process between the researchers, we negotiated and finally agreed upon the extracted information. Since the data and methods of the reviewed articles were heterogeneous, we combined the findings in this study qualitatively. To do so, the final articles were entered into ATLAS.ti (version 8) software for content analyzing and coding and their information was combined into three main themes: the approach or theory used for conceptualizing the change and its promoting and preventing factors.

This study was to summarize the findings of past studies and provide a more general picture of change and transformation in family organizations. Specifically, this research aimed to answer two main questions: “What approaches and theories are used in the conceptualization of change in family organizations?” and “What are the factors promoting and preventing change in family organizations?” Regarding the first question, the finding of this study is that change in family organizations is mainly conceptualized around five main perspectives: succession, entrepreneurship, sustainable business development, socio-emotional wealth, and organizational culture. As for the second question, reviewing articles shows that factors preventing and promoting change in family organizations are not far from these topics. For example, one factor that drives change in family organizations is the existence of an entrepreneurial culture and the existence of an entrepreneurial leader and founder. Also, the existence of a suitable substitute and non-family expert staff are factors that lead to change. This means that change in family organizations mainly happens either through an internal factor (i.e., entrepreneurial culture) or an external factor (i.e., the presence of non-family experts). These two observations show two main strategies to facilitate change in family organizations that can be used by managers or change consultants. The same pattern is observed among preventing factors. The existence of non-professional managers, traditional attitudes towards organization management, and nepotism have been among the preventing factors. This means that if the organizational culture of a family organization is institutionalized in the form of anti-change norms such as nepotism or authoritarian leadership, it would be one of the biggest obstacles to change. In such a case, managers or change consultants can facilitate changes in these organizations by making cultural interventions such as organizational confrontation meetings.

CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS:

By categorizing and combining theories/approaches to the conceptualization of change and its preventing and promoting factors in family organizations, this study paves the way for developing a change management model in family organizations. For this purpose, this study has categorized all the obtained preventing and promoting factors into five capabilities: adaptability, human capital, generational transition, manager/s, and change management. This means that those factors that help to create these five capabilities are the promoting factors, and those that weaken these capabilities are the factors that prevent change in these organizations. Based on this classification, future studies can conduct research on how to measure and mature these capabilities in family organizations and provide a model for promoting and successfully managing changes in family organizations.

The dynamic process of governance, management and carrying out the public affairs of the society requires the provision of expenditures that are referred to as "public expenditures" of the country, because these expenditures can be considered as facilitators for the realization of the purposes specified in the country's constitution. Undoubtedly, every country resorts to various theories to determine the form and content of these expenses. In the existing literature of public expenditures, there are four main theories that governments use to manage their public expenditures: macroeconomic performance theory, public economic theory, general theory of political systems, and budget goals theory. These four theories claim that the decisions of governments and governments regarding public expenditures are made according to economic considerations, economic relations between the government and citizens, the influences and concerns of political actors, and the goals included in the country's annual budget document. However, in Iran, other theories can have an impact on the justification and allocation of government expenditures, because the the government is Islamic. The purpose of this article is to reflect on these theories and suggest strategies to reduce the costs of state management.

The philosophy and mission of government is to deal with the risks facing the society. The main tools for doing such a special task are public policies, but these policies face a variety of inherent and environmental risks in achieving their goals. While the inherent risks are rooted in the wrong understanding of the problem, policy formulation and design, selection of alternatives, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policy performance, environmental risks refer to the risks faced by public policies during implementation. Since public policy analysis is considered to be the center of gravity of public policies, one of the main concerns of analysts in this field is to understand, diagnose, measure and manage the risk of such policies. Few studies have dealt with risk research in the field of policy analysis. The ultimate goal of this article is to draw the attention of the scientific community and agents of the country to “risk research” in national policy studies in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Therefore, while analyzing the concept and strategies of coping with risk, a framework for recognizing and managing “public policy risks” is provided. At the end, a guideline for future research in this important field will be suggested.

The high rate of environmental changes creates more difficult conditions for organizations and disrupts their performance. Therefore, the ability of organizations to maintain proper performance despite the crises has become important. One of the important issues in this regard is how to improve the reliability of organizations or the ability to maintain proper performance in crisis conditions. Organizational reliability has two hard and soft areas, the dimensions of which have been the focus of researchers for several decades, but less attention has been paid to the dimensions of the soft area. Hence, despite the wide scope of application and recent theoretical attention focused on the dimensions of the soft domain of organizational reliability, the dimensions and components of this type of reliability have not been identified in a way that can help its implementation in organizations. The current research was conducted with the aim of analyzing the soft dimensions of organizational reliability in public organizations. This research was done with a qualitative approach. The participants were managers and experts of six public organizations who had experience in crisis management and safety. The statistical population was sixteen and the sampling method was purposeful. Data collection tools were semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis method was used to analyze the data. The findings show that the model of soft dimensions of organizational reliability includes human resources, organizational, knowledge, and human resource management capabilities. Moreover, the improvement in these capabilities helps the continuity of organizations' services in critical situations.

In recent times, owing to the rapid growth of technologies and their significant impacts on economic, political and social spheres as well as the changing expectations of citizens, digital transformation in the public sector has become an imperative need. Governments act as the guardians of the society in harnessing and benefiting from digital transformation. However, despite this, there are challenges confronting the government that hinder it from playing such a role. According to the literature review and the lack of a comprehensive framework of the challenges of digital transformation in Iran's public sector, this study was conducted with the aim of analyzing the challenges facing Iran's public sector in establishing digital transformation. In this study, the qualitative content analysis method was employed to collect data and extract expert opinions from semi-structured interviews with 40 information technology specialists. Based on the findings, the challenges of digital transformation in Iran's government organizations can be categorized into four types: hardware challenges (information technology infrastructure and financial infrastructure), software challenges (digital governance and the culture of digital transformation), human challenges (competencies of digital transformation custodians and digital citizenship competencies) and ecosystem challenges (ecosystem interactions and ecosystem capacity). This framework can be utilized by theorists and researchers as a guide for future studies on digital transformation in the public sector and provide useful guidelines for policymakers and government managers.

Artificial intelligence and technologies based on it can affect all areas of human life. Undoubtedly, the process of governance, management, and current operations, which is called statesmanship, will also be affected by this huge progress of this century. The great achievements of this technology have been studied by many scientists around the world. Any technological phenomenon, including artificial intelligence, can also have dark areas. In this article, some of the challenges caused by the emergence of artificial intelligence in the process of governance will be explored.

The rapid development of intelligence technologies has expanded the technological capabilities of the government, but the application of these technologies in various fields of special government functions has accelerated tremendously. Undoubtedly, the process of statesmanship (governance, management, and operations) based on artificial intelligence technologies is the inevitable necessity of the current era and will be the most important mechanism for the leading and administration of the country and society in the not-so-distant future. Artificial intelligence and related technologies can greatly affect the quality, speed and timeliness of governance, management, and executive operations and bring huge outcomes to the country. In this article, I want to review some of these outcomes.

Deciding on the implementation of the organization's well-being strategies and programs is one of the main concerns of human resource managers to improve the health and well-being of employees. Because identifying the desired programs from the employees' perception, along with measuring the level of their implementation, not only creates more satisfaction and happiness in the employees but also enables the organization's executive ability to spend the budget with the least waste of resources. What should be done to decide on the direction of various programs in the organization? After analyzing 6 strategies, 13 programs, and 60 actions to promote employees’ well-being in the qualitative stage, the present mixed study shows how to prioritize each action of the employee well-being programs in the workplace by applying the importance-performance analysis technique in the quantitative stage. The statistical population of this research was all 320 employees of the administrative and recruitment organization, of which 200 were selected as a sample. The research results show that managers can focus more on some of the 60 actions, discard or continue some of them, and finally give less priority to some of these actions to decide about employee well-being programs at work.

According to the new theory of metaphor, metaphors contribute a crucial role in understanding phenomena by structuring and classifying concepts and the semantic system of the human mind. Based on this, by diagnosing the metaphors governing people’s minds, it is possible to understand their way of looking at the world to some extent and predict their actions towards their surrounding environment. On the other hand, the purpose of social sciences, including management, is to understand, predict and control human actions. A simple comparison between the stated function of identifying people’s mind metaphors and the purpose of social sciences can well explain the status of metaphor research (with the aim of describing people’s mind metaphors) in social sciences. However, despite the stated importance, no coherent and systematic method for metaphor research has been presented so far, and often the results of these researches, i.e., metaphors, have been given attention. The authors intend to present a revised method for metaphor research in organization and management studies in the form of five main steps: statement of the problem and research rationale, research question, data collection method, data interpretation method, and how to write the conclusion in metaphorical research.

The purpose of this study is to design and implement an effective performance management system in a public financial Fund using the Socratic method and dialogues. The first stage of the study seeks to intervene using this method while identify performance criteria and indicators and in the second stage, based on the findings of the previous stage, the purpose is to investigate the impact of interventions on staff performance, employees' perception of supervisor’s behaviors in the performance management process, and PM-related behavioral and attitudinal consequences. As an explorative mixed method, this study has used the method of dialogue and questioning approach as an intervention technique to extract the key criteria and performance indicators. In the second stage, in order to investigate the effect of the interventions, a quasi-experimental design with unequl groups consisting of three experimental groups, control 1 and control 2 was used. A sample of 166 people was selected from the three groups so that 53 people were selected for the intervention group, 68 people for the control group 1, and 45 people for the control group 2. In the qualitative stage, performance criteria were identified, reviewed, and modified. In the quasi-experimental study section, post-test results showed that employees who effectively participated in the process of designing and implementing the performance management system performed better than the control groups.

The Administrative and Recruitment Affairs Organization of Iran is responsible for reforms governance in various dimensions of the public sector, including structural, process, human resources, cultural, technological, and managerial aspects, as well as the optimal level of political presence in administration and local government. Therefore, according to these reform axes, it has designed vice-chairs in its structure. The Administrative and Employment Affrias Organization has an irreplaceable role in the transformation of the country (governance, administration, and running operations). Although these reform transformations in the structure of the public sector have been considered in different governments, it seems that several reform axes have been seriously considered by this organization, which, if realized, can lead to a huge change in the “thought, dialogue, and administrative behavior” of the Iranian public sector, which I will talk about in this article.

Performance evaluation -at any level of organization- is influenced by some environmental factors that are usually less considered. Therefore, recognizing these conditions, paying attention to them and trying to neutralize them will increase the accuracy and precision of the evaluation results. Therefore, considering the importance of performance evaluation in high levels of public administration, this study selected Iranian Minister of Science, Research and Technology as a case study to identify the effective environmental conditions in evaluating his performance.

Thematic analysis is a method for identifying and analyzing patterns in qualitative data, by which qualitative data is divided, classified, summarized and reconstructed. Thematic analysis is essentially a descriptive strategy that facilitates the search for patterns within qualitative data sets.

The global and organizing themes of the research are as follows: a. Political conditions including politicization, influence of officials and institutions, and stability of position, b. Structure including ministry structure, government structure and system structure, c. Appointments, d. Legal / administrative conditions including lack of authority, and lack of a system for training ministers, e. Public image including acceptance, and reputation, f. society including inappropriate demands, and cultural-social-economic conditions, and g. international conditions including sanctions and international policies.

Considering the importance of performance evaluation of Minister of Science, Research and Technology and the need to increase the validity and reliability of its results, it is suggested that during evaluation, efforts be made to neutralize the effects of environmental conditions obtained in the present study.

The fundamental principle of the success and sustainability of social systems in the path of progress is principle of meritocracy. In addition, societies increasing evolution and governments' efforts to increase the quality and efficiency of public sector services have increasingly focused their attention to importance of nurturing and hiring qualified leaders. Besides, if we look at the importance of science and technology in the new world -which is the most fundamental basis for the advancement of countries- the importance of meritocracy in its leaders and institutions will be more cleared. Therefore, this study aimed to design a competency model for the Iranian Minister of Science, Research and Technology.

Thematic analysis is a method for identifying and analyzing patterns in qualitative data, by which qualitative data is divided, classified, summarized and reconstructed. Thematic analysis is essentially a descriptive strategy that facilitates the search for patterns within qualitative data sets.

Through interview with 42 experts, 794 primary themes were obtained which were analyzed by thematic analysis into 3 global themes, 13 organizing themes and 44 basic themes.

The first global theme is individual competency, which is divided into four organizing themes of intrinsic, value, attitude-behavioral and occupational. The second global theme is knowledge competency, which is divided into five organizing themes of knowledge of job field, experience, scientific image, knowledge of Islamic-humanities and management knowledge; and third global theme is the skill competency that comprises four organizing themes of management, leadership, political and interactive.

Conversations are the main channels for the formation of organizational changes that can speed up or slow down the speed of change implementation and thus determine the success or failure of organizational change programs. From this viewpoint, an organizational change program has a suitable implementation speed when it has a smooth passage through the four levels of initiative, understanding, performance, and closure conversations. However, the occurrence of mental and linguistic barriers in the process of formation of the change conversations leads to the failure of the desired timely implementation of these programs. Based on this, the aim of the current research is to explore the effective factors in timely and successful or late and unsuccessful implementation of change programs in the context of organizational conversations in Soban Educational Holding. This research is a qualitative study that uses a combination of qualitative techniques of semi-structured interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis to collect data, and uses thematic analysis to analyze the data. The participants are all the organizational members involved in the two change programs of Soban Educational Holding. The findings show that performance and then understanding conversations account for the largest volume of change conversations and, slowing down the speed of change implementation. Additionally, the findings show that most of the mental and linguistic barriers to the formation of effective change conversations occur at the level of understanding conversations, but performance conversations occupy a larger volume of change conversations and thus, play a more important role in advancing the changes.

Guiding research and changing its content by actors inside and outside of scientific community is a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of many researchers in the field of research governance. The purpose of this research is to describe a part of these researches to understand how research is governed. This description has been formed in the reciprocating with a more basic framework, i.e. the freedom-responsibility duality. Thus, by adopting a narrative review approach, after expressing an argument about the possibility of research governance, the main discussions about manner of arranging the authority relations in the field of research have been proposed with a view to the aforementioned duality. This duality, on one side of which is independence and scientific freedom (necessity of self-assignment of research tasks by the researcher) and on the other side of which is accountability and responsibility of research (compliance with external expectations from research), has been historically analyzed and the process of shifting from a contradictory relationship to an interactive and complementary relationship is described. Finally, seven lines of research from its manifestation in the formation of research governance mechanisms have been counted that common feature of all of them is a kind of influence on research while maintaining its functional necessity (research independence).

The present qualitative research was conducted to analyze strategies, programs, and actions to improve employees’ well-being in their workplaces from the perspective of employees working in Iranian public organizations.

Based on the qualitative content analysis method, the current study analyzes the data collected from 14 public organizations in a period from the beginning of the Iranian calendar year of 1399 to the end of 1400 (March 2020- March 2021). Although semi-structured interviews (n = 115) were the primary source of data collection, researchers' observations, existing studies, and internal and external organizational reports had also a noticeable effect on developing and improving the themes.

The findings of the study showed "employee well-being in light of people interactions in the organization"; "employee well-being in light of organizational environment"; "employee well-being in light of organizational structure"; "employee well-being in light of organizational technology"; "employee well-being in light of organizational systems "and "employee well-being in light of organizational culture” were drawn as the six themes (main strategies). Moreover, 13 main categories and 63 sub-categories were obtained as programs and actions of the public organizations to promote workplace well-being from the perspective of employees in the public organizations.

Various individual, organizational, and environmental factors lead to the formation of well-being in the workplaces. Positive relationships and support from managers and co-workers are necessary at the individual level. At the organizational level, good social and physical structure, the use of advanced and safe technology, equitable compensation, efficient human resource systems, and a culture of values, norms, and symbols that facilitate well-being in the workplace is needed. Also, creating a friendly work environment, and the positive social prestige of the organization in society are various environmental programs that can lead to an exciting and motivating work environment that promotes well-being at the workplace.

In the past two decades, interest in the concept of complexity science and its research has increased in public administration. Complexity science (CS) is the interdisciplinary investigation of, and attempt to explain and understand, complex systems. Public Administration (PA) as administrating complex systems in the public sector has been the focus of several studies. However, scoping reviews of CS research in PA have not been conducted to guide further research in this area. The purpose of this scoping review is to describe and analyze studies focusing on CS in PA to elicit an overall picture of the research in this field. A scoping review methodology guided by Arksey and O'Malley and Levac et al. was used. Studies were identified by conducting electronic searches on 5 Research Databases. Of 32 articles matched the inclusion criteria. CS is a topical research area that has been explored with different methods and outcomes, in different environments, and has mainly been perceived positively. Novel perspectives and more diverse methodological approaches paying attention to issues affecting the generalizability of the findings could expand our knowledge in this area.

In the last two decades, complexity theory has become more of a theory-in-use in PA although it remains some way from the mainstream or fully accepted. Despite, there is neither a comprehensive image of the functionality of CS nor its application in PA. However, there were some efforts to show the contribution of CS in PA and to enumerate useful key concepts of it in public management.
This study aims to describe and analyze studies focusing on CS in PA to elicit an overall picture of the research in this field. There is no review study in this scope of PA to conduct scholars in their way of researches.

The statistical population of the study is all articles were published in 6 scientific databases between 1999 and 2019.

Since past decades progress has been made by adopting useful complexity concepts not previously used or well understood in PA such as adaptation, self-organization, coevolution, emergence. Other scholars have pursued a path of comparing extant theories with complexity theory, for example, network governance and institutions, to show how complexity theory might work in concert with the better-established theory. A third path also appears to have merit and could work alongside both the former. It aims to identify implicit or explicit use of complexity concepts in extant theories and show how complexity theory concepts can provide some coherence across these theories at a metalevel. In this vein, complexity theory offers new insights into areas commonly focused on by PA scholars: the roles of actors, policy processes, and decisions. In addition to theoretical usage of CS studies, there are various efforts to provide some practical tools for extending the domain of CS scope in PA.
This scoping review was conducted to provide an estimation of the breadth and scope of available research literature and to gain main findings and foci of done studies to guide further researches in the scope of CS and PA and to increase our knowledge in this area.

A scoping review methodology guided by Arksey and O’Malley and Levac et al. was used. Scoping reviews can be undertaken to examine the extent, range, and nature of research activity by mapping all relevant research literature. Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework outlines a five-stage approach for conducting scoping reviews as 1. identifying the research question, 2. identifying relevant studies, 3. Study selection, 4. charting the data, and 5. collating, summarizing, and reporting the results.

In the range of 20 years of study selection, there are 32 articles with 5566 citations that matched with research criteria. Britain and the U.S have the main contribution in article publication by publishing 30 articles. Public Management Review is the main journal by publishing 9 articles. Most of the studies are conducting by a qualitative research design.
Mainstreams of studies’ foci are the proximity of methodology of studying PA and complexity’s phenomena, application of complexity theory in terms of a practical and theoretical tool for modeling PA issues, studying nature and reasons of complexity in the process of decision making, codification, execution, and assessment of policymaking in PA.

CS has been explored in different environments with different methods and outcomes, but it has been perceived mainly positively. Mainly the focus of the studies was on finding associations between CS and PA in a practical and theoretical term. The strongest empirical evidence was in linking the CS with network governance, self-organizing in the public sector, coevoluting between social complex systems and external actors, and adapting in different layers on governance system.
Methodologically, more attention should be paid to issues that strongly affect the generalizability of the findings. In this respect, also the systematic use of power analysis in estimating required sample sizes is justified depending on the sampling method. Moving forward to more sophisticated research designs such as to cause–effect estimation would provide knowledge for targeted development projects in areas that need improvement. Simultaneous use of different instruments would provide a deeper understanding of concepts in CS and how these concepts relate to each other. Different qualitative approaches, such as ethnography, critical theory, case studies, or authors network analysis would provide new, deeper knowledge of experiences related to CS and PA which could contribute to the development of new instruments to measure CS in PA.

Public policies are the link between national governance and public administration. The ultimate goal of these policies is to solve public problems. The policy problem refers to a need that has not been met, a value that is not respected, or an opportunity that has not been used. Problem-oriented is a characteristic of the realm of public policy. But under the law of Unintended Effects, sometimes these policies not only don't solve problems, they make them worse. Regarding the causes of these effects, many scattered studies have been done. However, no comprehensive framework has been provided to diagnose these causes. Accordingly, the main question of this article is “why some public policies make the situation worse”. In the light of the “patient-doctor” metaphor, the author examines and analyzes the twenty causes of this phenomenon by citing evidence in Iran. The author claims that this framework of causes can be a diagnostic framework for evaluating the quality of public policies. At the end, the theoretical and practical implications of this analysis will be presented and reviewed for researchers and policymakers.

One of the mechanisms that can improve the quality of the government is transparency. Accordingly, many governments hope to reduce corruption in the government and improve their financial performance by relying on transparency, while increasing citizens' confidence. Several researches have been conducted on the antecedents and consequences of transparency in the government. Despite all the media hype and the optimistic perception of such effects of transparency, some scholars have been hesitant about the effectiveness of this state-management mechanism in recent years. Despite the positive effects of transparency, it seems to have a series of negative effects as well. In this issue, some of these negative works are reviewed and analyzed.