Diagnosing the process of the comprehensive system of tourism education in Iran in the field of entrepreneurship by using social network analysis Technique

The aim of the current research was to identify the complications in the process of the comprehensive system of tourism education in Iran in the field of entrepreneurship. This research is applied in terms of purpose and qualitative-quantitative in terms of method, based on semi-structured interviews with experts involved in the supply and demand system of tourism education and the technique of social network analysis. In the qualitative part, the statistical community of organizations involved in the tourism education supply and demand cluster included 238 organizations. In qualitative results, according to two clusters of supply and demand - supply with 160 and demand with 78 units - based on Cochran's formula, interviews were conducted with experts of 177 organizations using random sampling. Then, the aforementioned interviews were coded and entered into the process of analyzing social networks in the form of scrutinized problems. In the quantitative part, social network analysis method and Gephi software have been used. In this software, existing relationships between actors are set based on input matrices and network analysis indicators, the existing situation and the most important actors have been extracted according to the test of the average degree of input and output. The results have shown that the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts and universities active in tourism have the highest number of problems from the side of other actors. This actors have been the most influential actors of the network. Also, the Ministry of Heritage, the Foundation of the Underprivileged, and the tour guide community, with a high degree of output, have more power in the network. Diagnosing the current state gives the experts the opportunity to identify the most important problems and actors, clarify the scope of duties of each organization and use its capacities to improve the system.