RELIGION & COMMUNICATION
Year:2018 | Volume:24 | Issue:2 (52) |Papers Count:7

Elite groups comprise a significant portion of every society, and if they are not recognized, recruited, guided and employed correctly and at the right time, the society will suffer serious harms in its progress. On the other hand, adolescence is a phase when one’s personality is developed and paves the way for one’s future life. Thus, it could be taken as a determining factor for the elite groups so that if it goes unattended, both the individual and the society will undergo unreparable harms. The adolescent at this time usually joins various groups to answer to his material and spiritual needs. Collective communication, under the category of social psychology surveys different issues as group dynamism, from the nature and features of a group to its formation theories, kind of member communication, and its functions. Recognizing these participatory observation and capacities in formulating the related policies about elite groups can play a crucial role in the identification, recruitment, and guidance of these groups in society. This research attempts to utilize the actual collective communication potentials in the field of adolescent elite groups to study the policies of the center for elite scholars that are active in the southern Tehran. It finally provides a model of collective communication capacities in order to formulate policies in the field of adolescent elites. To this end, besides using documentary methods, it has benefited from participatory observation and in-depth interview for studying the whole intended group.

The fashion dress industry as one of the most popular and profitable industries in the contemporary world has a complex nature, and any related policy must inevitably make a systematic study of its mechanism in society. Here, due to the significant role of the media in shaping the culture and lifestyle, the media policy for clothing fashionis taken into consideration based on analyzing its cycle problems as well as the background of related media policy in Iranian society. Studying this cycle with the help of an in- depth interview and documentary study and data analysis (using thematic analysis method) resulted in identifying eight main problems including epistemological bewilderment in the field of Islamic Iranian fashion, absence of a political economy of Islamic Iranian clothing fashion and overlooked local clothing styles. These are all seriously connected with the general problem of the absence of Islamic Iranian brands in clothing fashion. Based on these problems eight media policy priorities and 38 pertinent policy recommendations were determined. Among these priorities is "helping to solve epistemic and skill- related problems in the field of fashion", "helping to shape the political economy of fashion, " and "helping Islamic Iranian clothing fashion to be more seen in everyday life of people.

National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET) schools, known as SAMPAD in Iran, a main pillar of policy making in elite education and training during the last three decades, has expanded and attracted a wide range of talented students from around Iran. The current study seeks to investigate various cultural dimensions of SAMPAD community of students/ alumni, based on the Internet corpus. In this regard and by using cultural semiotics as method, the theoretical framework has been organized on the basis of the Cultural Dimension Theory (Geert Hofstede et al., 2012). In addition, the dynamism of SAMPAD semiotic components in the context of the relationship/ opposition between Ego and Alter (non-SAMPAD) provides access to some important cultural properties. Accordingly, a SAMPAD student Group in Facebook, which is the largest group dedicated to SAMPAD in social networks and has more than 21900 members, was selected for sampling. From the perspective of semiotic analysis, in regard to the historical objectives of SAMPAD educational institutions and the necessity of recognizing various identities derived from it, the binary opposition Barbarous/ Hellenism plays a crucial role in creating SAMPAD community. In this context, individualism, masculinity, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation are considered to be the dominant cultural dimensions of SAMPAD's identity.

A glimpse into the media sphere that surrounds Iranian society and the international community, besides the existing equipment and technical innovations, has created a new situation in it. These major changes on the one hand, and the almost saturated media sphere with a variety of radio and television networks and the spread of cyberspace on the other hand, make planners and decision-makers seek a suitable and efficient model that suits the existing condition. Based on this viewpoint, the present research has posed this question: what is the ultimate model for media- related policy making in the Islamic Republic of Iran? What is essential for the media here is to follow some principles. The first is its religiosity, which entails insight, security and tranquility. Moral scrupulousness, raising hope and consciousness are among authentic specifications of planning the desired media in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and these are the ones which should provide for Islamic- Iranian way of life, family integrity, creating modern Islamic civilization, population increase, maintaining national identity, recognizing enemies, encouraging marriage, making people aware of their countries’ challenges, and explaining western crises.

Providing Cultural Atlas is a way of analyzing the cultural phenomenon in the field of cultural policy- making. In developed countries such as France, USA, England and Russia the cultural and anthropological databases are continually used in cultural engineering of the countries and its results are presented in their Cultural Atlas. This of course requires a cultural reading in the framework of cultural indexes and specifications. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the effect of providing Cultural Atlas in policy- making and cultural engineering of the country. Therefore, the research question is to evaluate the effectiveness of components and conditions of national and regional culture in representing different dimensions of the culture and the role it plays in policy- making and cultural engineering cycle. The research also evaluates whether it is possible to achieve good results in presenting the model of cultural engineering in the country through providing the Iranian Cultural Atlas. It is, therefore, possible to get the cultural differences in the country’s cultural geography dimensions as developed by Geert Hofstede. In this research, the dimensions and components of Iranian Cultural Atlas, which is supposed to be the basis for cultural impact assessment and evaluation of social impacts, are explained based on the documentation review, alongside the meta- analysis of national and international researches.Through explaining the essentials of statistics and studies such as Hofstede and Globe, this research indicates that consideration of these elements can change the domain of cultural impact assessment and evaluation of social impacts in Iran and also can open new dimensions in addition to providing a new definition of Cultural Atlas.

Religious rituals provide a particular opportunity for their adherents and practitioners to assert themselves vis-à-vis other religious identities, and at the same time they are an apt opportunity for the representation of their cultural and social conditions. Among Islamic sects, Shia, as a remarkable minority whose affectionate attachment to the Prophet's Household is a significant feature of it, has been unduly marginalized in long terms of its history under the pressure of Sunni majority, and has been granted little time to demonstrate its magnificence. Husseini rituals are among the most important and efficient collective rituals of Shias that are mixed with the popular culture in terms of the development and performance quality.Arbaeen procession which is organized annually in the direction of Karbala on the 40th day of Imam Hussein's martyrdom has proved itself, especially in recent years, as one of the most massive rituals in the world, by involving large sections of Shias from around the world. In this research, by considering the specific features and advantages of this, it has been attempted to study this phenomenon by using direct observation of the event and qualitative demographic assessment and by considering the three basic pillars of ritual practice, i.e. essence, structure and functions through the participants' (pilgrims, promoters and organizers) interpretations. It must be noticed that despite a recourse to the ritual background which refers to Iraqi social history, the focus of our research is on Iranians.The results derived from two phases of assessing data gained through interviews, field observations and coding them show that this ritual is in close contact with three general concepts: affection to the Prophet's Household, global demonstration and Shia identity.

In recent decades, the approach to the planning of sustainable community development has had a huge importance in the field of urban planning and management. The participation of people is one of the main factors of this approach and it tries to include them in different stages of decision making, execution and evaluation and tries to benefit from their capacity and potentials. This has been the center of attention in Iran in recent years and many books have been published about it. In order to implement such an approach in every city, we need to consider their specifications and provide a local pattern for them. One of the main elements of Islamic cities and communities is mosque which hasusually beengiven a central role in them and has assumed different functions in history and contemporary time, and because of that, it can be used as an effective example of cultural- social development at local level. In this research a local type of cultural- social development based on mosque has been presented. To do this, we have connected many studies done on community development, cultural- social development and mosques and we have introduced 9main components as the main factors of sustainable cultural- social community development based on mosques. Then by using qualitative method and interviews and participatory observation, we selected Samen-al-Aemeh Mosque in Shahrak-e-Gharb district, and while adjusting those components with it, we assessed the scope of the feasibility of this development together with the existing obstacles. The conclusion is that despite its not achieving an ideal efficiency in all socio- cultural domains, the mosque has succeeded in promoting cooperation and people’s participation in their local issues and developing their community sense.