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Vajhollah Ghorbanizadeh ,Asgar Moshabbaki2 1. Ph.D. Student of Management, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran 2. Associate Professor of Management,Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran Received:4/17/2005 Accept:1/7/2006 Abstract Creating and protecting competitive advantage by organizations in the 21st century, requires identifying affective environmental changes on organizations, agility and adoption with those changes and increasing capability for answering the various needs of customers. Only learning organizations have these properties. For being learning, organizations apply a process that includes four sub processes including: 1) identifying and creating information, 2) interpreting and transforming information, 3) applying information at work/ creating knowledge, and 4)institutionalizing of knowledge. Applying these processes requires organizational fitness and specific characteristics of leadership, manpower, organizational design, organizational culture, mission and strategies. These characteristics facilitate learning and becoming learning organization. Innovative aspect of this research is that it provides a model that identifies learning levels of the automobile pieces manufacturing firms based on learning process and learning organization characteristics. The obtained results indicated that learning level differs from one firm to another and we can divide all organizations to three levels: 1) data oriented, 2) information oriented and 3) knowledge oriented with respect to their focus on data, information and knowledge. Considering how much learning process is applied and how much characteristics of learning organizations are obtained, each organization lays on one of the mentioned category levels.

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Today, policymakers and economists use widely rational expectations (RE) in monetary, financial and regulatory policies to improve their country economic performance. In some of the pertinent models to these policies, expectations have been formed by assuming rationality and full information on economics. Indeed, economic agents have no perfect information about some parameters of these models. These unknown parameters can be estimated in the form rational expectations during learning process. In this research, the impact of government policies on the inflation rate has been modeled on the basis of rational expectations under learning process. Data has been gathered from Central Bank of Iran (CBI) and Iran’s economic development plans over the period 1989-2009. Results show that current inflation in the country originates mainly from economy structure and government policies, so share of public inflationary expectations is negligible. In addition, the learning process in Iran will converge to rational expectations, thus government policies for reducing inflation and increasing employment are inefficient. It is recommended that government adopt unanticipated and sudden policies to be effective its plans.

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Agriculture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has witnessed many phases, from ancient small-scale Bedouin nomadic subsistence agriculture to mass-scale farming to ensure food security and self-sufficiency, to the present-day desire for sustainability. These transitions have made the work of extension staff very challenging. Effective extension work depends upon competent and well-trained agricultural extension staff. This study assessed the competencies of extension workers and identified the training needed to improve their work in the Saudi Agricultural Extension Service (SAES). Demographic information (age, length of service, and education level) was also collected. The study mailed a pre-tested questionnaire to all 250 extension professionals actively involved in extension work, and 181 responses were received. Most agricultural extension workers had qualifications in plant protection, plant production, and general agriculture before entering the Extension Service (19.3, 17.6, and 16.8%, respectively). Only 7.7% had specialized in agricultural extension and agricultural engineering. The study established the need for extensive training programs to enable extension workers to work efficiently and effectively in the changing farming scenario in the Kingdom. Results showed that training needs are correlated with the length of service and educational qualifications. Respondents wanted to have sufficient competency and skill to understand the relationships between the Extension Service and other agriculture related organizations; to understand how mass communication has influenced society; and to enhance their competencies in the area of the teaching-learning process. The primary areas of training needs identified in the survey are in the techniques of research and evaluation, and the teaching-learning process.