Social Problems of Iran
Year:2011 | Volume:1 | Issue:2 (NEW SERIES OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES)|Papers Count:7

According to some scholars, ' whose concern is the role of religion in today's society, secularization is a common process that will affect all societies inevitably. However, in the field of sociology of religion, in which theories of secularization have been developed, some theories against secularization theories have been developed because of the events happened in the last decades of 20th and early years of 21th century.In Iran where religion is interwoven in social structure, this issue has always had a fundamental importance for academic, ideological and political debates.However, it is in the recent years that these topics have found an academic and systematic framework. Meanwhile, most of Secularization discussions in Iran have on theoretical level. This article is an attempt to investigate the secularization indicators that can be primarily used in empirical study of this process in Iran and in examination the truth or falsehood of secularization theories. After introducing primary debates and related definitions, secularization theories have been discussed. Finally in the light of these theories, objective indicators of secularization process have been suggested for empirical study of the process in Iran.The study recognizes secularization indicators in two levels: individual and social level. Accordingly, the empirical study of secularization process in Iran can be done by searching for presence or absence and intensity or weakness of these indicators.

Every society, based on its present situation, has defined social health, i.e.healthy society, differently. The aim of present study is to reach to such definition and then to compose an Iranian Social Health Index (ISHI).To do so, a Delphi research was carried out which resulted in 17 criteria as the components of social health: (1) lack of poverty, (2) lack of violence, (3) controlled growth of population, (4) lack of gender discrimination, (5) equality of people in the eyes of the law, (6) lack of violation of human rights and other international conventions related to the rights of humankind, (7) obligatory and free-of-charge education up to 8th grade and then non-obligatory but free-of-charge, (8) access to health care for all people, (9) full of security, (10) full of freedom of thought, (11) satisfaction of people of their life, (12) full coveraf insurance, (13) redistributive justice in incomes, (14) lack of unemployment, (15) lack of ethnic, racial, and geographic discriminations, (16) democratically elected and (17) democratically supervised government.To examine this consensus-based definition empirically (construct validity) and achieving to a combining index for social health, the existing data of six indexes such as natural growth rate (NGR), murder, unemployment, insurance coverage, and literacy from30 provinces in 2008 were analyzed by explanatory- factor analysis and as a result two indicators of less social capability (e.g.population growth, poverty, insurance coverage and literacy) and social problems (e.g. unemployment and murder) were obtained that can explain 68.3 percent of Iran's social health construct variance.

Social conflicts are among the most common problems in the world and, specially, in the Middle East.Dimensions, typologies and different phases of social conflict have many various causes in different levels. According to Belav’s definition of social structure, distribution of people in social positions based on nominal parameters causes diversity and heterogeneity and based on classification parameters produces causes inequality. The more inequality that accompanied by diversity and heterogeneity, the more conflict, particularly violent conflicts.This is more likely to happen in countries with low level of development in its different dimensions. Therefore, the level of conflict varies depending on the level of inequality, discrimination and development.In this paper an attempts has been made to examine the relationship between inequality and structural heterogeneity with conflict based by using a combination of different international data. This relation has been examined in two stages: first, among all countries of the world and then among Middle East countries.This data clearly confirms that more inequality growth accompanied with heterogeneity, more probable violent and bloody conflicts will be. This probability increases in less developed countries. Therefore, social conflicts differ according to rates and types of inequality. Furthermore, the relationship between conflicts and inequality changes in different countries.

The present article tends to study the religiosity transformations in Iranian society based on existing researches from 1974 to 2009. The pre-revolution regime was a secular one and attempted to secularize society. In contrast, the Islamic post-revolution regime, by employing various types of politicies tried to Islamize the society. The main question of this article is whether the adoption of formal processes of Islamization of society or political-religious socialization by Islamic Republic of Iran has resulted in the increase of Iranian's personal religiosity or not. This has been examined based on a secondary analysis of the data of several national surveys conducted between 1974 and 2009.In addition to descriptive findings about Iranian religiosity in last three decades, the difference between different age groups is shown and is analyzed by using the theory of social change. The most important results include: Although, religiosity in Iranian society has been decreased in most of indexes of religiosity from 1974 to 2009, this decrease is not notable except in a few indexes. Secondly, in 2009, religiosity of people who were fifty years old and more was higher than younger people.

The present article has focused on the relationship between neighborhood identity and social control that ultimately leads to decrease of social abnormality in neighborhood. It has don based on socio-spatial approach with combining social control theories and theories of urban sociology. The data collected by a survey method, in which statistical population was 6 neighborhoods of Tehran (Zargandeh, Shahr-Ara, Narmak, Rah-Ahan, Amirie and Ferdos) with a sample size of 372 persons.Findings show that neighborhood identity differs between different locals of Tehran. Neighborhood identity can be a good ground for persons' growth and enrichment dependency, commitment and participation in community by strengthening 3 elements, i.e.; dependency, commitment, and participation. It can increase the sense of social control in the neighborhood and prevent people's tendencies to deviance in the local scale. However, the general findings show that neighborhood identity in Tehran's neighborhood is considerably law, so without having a clear long time plan, it won' t be possible to create a background for social solidarity and informal social control.

Crime economy is one of the interdisciplinary subjects which intends to analyze crime economically. With regard to relatively increasing tendency to crime in our country, it is important to study different aspects of reasons of committing crime especially economic aspect for some crimes such as drug smuggling which has direct relationship with economic affairs. Moreover, a precise and scientific understanding of cause and effect relationships between these two will provide the policymakers an appropriate guide for better management of society.In the present article, analytic –descriptive method has been used and relationship between unemployment rate and drug smuggling is explained by reliance on existing statistics and information and on the basis of regression models in OLS method.The findings indicate that there is a positive relationship between unemployment rate, monthly cost of families, proportion of urbanization and drug while monthly income of families and divorce rate have a negative relationship with drug smuggling.The obtained results point out that unemployment, in addition to costs such as unemployment insurance expense and reduction of skill and specialty of labor force and other direct and indirect expenses imposed on economy, resulted in another expense that is the increase of crimes like drug smuggling which will have harmful effects on society.

Social science sources and literature have offered various views on the issue of growth and development of sociology in Iran. Some scholars believe sociology in Iran has required a desirable expansion due to lack of theory making and it has not grown in accordance to the present needs and challenges.However, given the present circumstances and the conditions of human sciences and sociology in Iran, there are some others who believe sociology has had the sufficient expansion. Mentioning to the amount of scientific productions in this field they give a good credit to its existence.These scholars make a rosy picture for the future of sociology in Iran. Different factors could be considered in explaining this subject. Without involving in development or under development debates of sociology of Iran, this article aims to give an analytical model for further expansion of sociology in Iran. It has done by using interviews with a number of sociology scholars and by looking at different theoretical approaches associated with sociological growth in a particular society such as Iran.Through this model some hypotheses can be deducted which can be used in other objective and systematic studies. Theories of Emile Durkheim, Tomas Kuhn, Karl Manheim and Michael Mulkay, the outstanding theorists in area of theory and thought in knowledge and science sociology, have been used in this article. The paper has applied mainly analytical-documentary and qualitative method and structured interview.