NAMEH-YE OLUM-E EJTEMAI
Year:2007 | Volume:- | Issue:31|Papers Count:8

Opium is the most prevalent drug in Iran. There are also evidences indicating that alcohol use is growing during recent years. This article examines some social factors affecting opium and alcohol use among university students. This was performed using the data of a survey on drugs use the sample of which included 5231 male and female students of 21 non-medical state universities from all over Iran. Examined variables include gender, socioeconomic status of the family, religiosity, anomie, educational and occupational expectations and hopes, and the involvement of family and friends in drug and alcohol. These were selected based on the implications of social deviance theories while considering the limitations of a secondary data analysis. The data revealed that all selected variables had significant relationship with both opium and alcohol use. However, the quality of the relationship between independent variables with opium differed to some extent with the quality of their relations with alcohol. The most striking different appeared in differential effect of religiosity and socio-economic status of family on opium and alcohol use.

Globalization, the emergent knowledge economy, and the competitive conditions increase the importance of debate on quality of higher education.Quality assurance (Q.A.) in higher education is not possible without institutional changes and reforms. The latecomers of development (Iran induded) face the contradictory issues. On the one hand, they have to follow a set of international and common norms and consensuses about Q.A. in higher education; on the other hand, they have their particular cultures and societies with some structural limitations and difficulties.The analysis of relationship between socio-cultural context of these societies (the Iran's case being discussed here) with the components of Q.A. in higher education helps us to develop a cognitive map that would change agents in the developing countries. Such a map is intended to help actors (at three levels: society, university, and the state) to make decisions and to act on the basis of an appropriate model of higher education evaluation, accreditation, essential policies, strategies and operations.

Today petroleum technology and industry is one of the most important and prominent industry worldwide, looked at from economic, technological, and political aspects. In Iran, petroleum sector plays an influential role in societal and economic development firstly seen from dependency of government income on oil revenues and secondly from sociological effects of oil technology on the people and districts of oil fields and areas containing oil related industries. Especially these effects may be crucial and risky in no-oil situation in future when the resources are finished confronting these communities with further difficulties because their development is based on oil production and not technology development.This essay investigates Iran's oil development stages technologically from its establishment until 1979, mainly in an actor-network framework. By analyzing the network of actors that formed this industry through 3 historical stages and determining the progress achieved in taking technological capabilities, it is concluded that this sector succeeded solely in operational technological capabilities and could not achieve innovation capabilities for high level technology development. Main factors that prevented the industry from reaching the design and R & D (high-level) capabilities are: lack of will for renovation capabilities development in powerful actors, low coordination and integration in the network, and disability of actors for proper translation of interests.

This article consists of several parts. The first part concerns the dwellings and residential patterns in the Toularoud area of Talesh. In this part the primitive and traditional dwellings are described and their cultural and technological variations taken under a close investigation. Subsequently the origin of political power in Talesh and its different nomadic organizations is discussed, with an emphasis on the economy, social esteem and materialistic structure of power. In the next part, the traditional clothes function, its variation and effective causes are discussed. There is also another part which deals with the economic features and characteristic rules of this group, both before and after their settlement. The last part deals with kinship and family systems, and also with its variations among the Talesh residents.

The extent of theoretical contribution of Clifford Geertz has gone beyond the limits of anthropology in the United States and other historical centers of this science. Geertz's approach is significant and influential not only in the sphere of interpretive anthropology (considering his fieldworks in South East Asia and North Africa) but also in many other branches of social sciences. Geertz brought a real methodological renovation with his "thick description" in a way that the etic participant observation of the researcher can be fit into the etic and indigenous view of things. This puts Geertz in a special place as that of Bourdieu and a few other thinkers of the late twentieth century such as Levi-Strauss. In this article we focus on the Geertzian approach to the religious phenomena which shows an evident influence from philosophers like Wittgenstein. This paper also attempts to show that the analytical model used by Geertz may be applied to understand phenomena other than religion in the social arena.

The assertion on fusion of science and technology, society and nature, inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary nature of knowledge production, and futility of cleavages between human and no-human phenomena, social and natural sciences, and other prevailing polarizations in sociology of science and Technology Studies (STS) are the most important characteristics of post- Mertonian and post-Khunian sociology of science or the sociology of techno science. For this genre of sociology, the key mission of techno science is to increasingly create stronger, wider, and larger networks through societal and physical process of translation. This agenda is the reflection of new modes and procedures driving knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption, particularly in new areas like biotechnology, nanotechnology, nano-biotechnology, information and communication technology (ICT by and large in universities and other institutes of the North or the developed world. Reflecting upon the history and development of sociology of science, this article aims to draw attention to the current trends and developments of the social theorizing on science and technology after two Godfathers, namely Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) and Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) with special emphasis on actor-Network Theory (ANT), as an integrated, well-organized, leading, and promising approach evolved from/into the STS. Moreover, the article touches on some lessons and/or potential implications of such developments which can be relevant to policies of knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption in the universities and other research institutes of Iran as a developing (South) country.

Comparative method is one of the oldest methods in the social science research. Nonetheless, its procedures are undergoing a continuing process of elaboration and sophistication. This paper initially attempts to explicate Ragin's QCA (Quantitative Comparative Analysis) method and its application in social sciences. QCA is a new method for the comparative analysis in the historical, political and sociological arenas. Finally, Cronqvist's MQCA (Multi-value Quantitative Comparative Analysis), as a more complicated version of Ragin' s QCA, will be discussed.