Iranian Journal of Sociology
Year:2006 | Volume:7 | Issue:1|Papers Count:7

Relationships and interactions between students and teachers constitute the main field of communication in higher education, and can be considered as the most important university capital. This is a survey-method research which studies the relationships between students and teachers in the social science disciplines within five Iranian state universities. Applying a perspective derived from sociology of science, different fields of communication in subjective dimensions are investigated. The findings show that, in different domains, the level of students' relations with teachers is low, although such a level differs among various universities. Our findings also indicate that an increase in students-teachers communication would influence educational and psychological variables such as students' academic achievement, self-respect, and self-efficacy. The final section of this paper presents some strategies for enhancement of communication.

This article's main effort is targeted towards determining the discussion's location within the secularization literature so that to clarify its path versus those paths as reflected in scattered thoughts, efforts, and other preoccupations in this area. The act of examinig the iranian secularization, as a probable process, requires three steps to be taken:1. To have a rather clear picture as to the context of occurrence.2. To have a clear and distinct definition of such a phenomenon.3. To critically investigate the current ideas expressed about the Iranian seculariza tion.The model presented here on the Iranian secularization, constitutes this paper's main claimand it is in fact its final product which includes suggestions as to:A. Factors influencing this process of secularization at four levels of: macro, middle, micro, and religion per se.B. The detailed indices for each of the above.C. The path and process of their occurrence.

This article aims to explain the question of relative independence of class of merchants, and the process of their class changes from the state during the Qajar dynasty. Stated as such, the question of this paper is whether merchants of the Qajar period can be considered as a relatively independent class from the state? In response to this question, and in an attempt to solve it, the research hypothesis was formulated through the following conceptual structure:We may recognize merchants of the Qajar period as a relatively independent class given the following periodization:Prior and up to the license-grants era, as an economic class. From the license-grants era up to the Constitutional Revolution, as a social class.From the Constitutional Revolution, up to the end of the First Parliament, as a political class.Our hypotheses have been evaluated against empirical evidence which have been gathered through historical method. The empirical findings tend to support the theoretical system of this research.

This paper is a reading on the state formation and its restructuring during the constitutional era (the Pahlavi period) based on the post-colonial state theory.Upon presenting the theoretical framework, we will consider the structural change resulting from annexation of the semi-colonial Iran to the capitalistic world market. In other words, the effects of such an annexation on Iran's political system would be examined. Then, we proceed by examining the condition under which such a state was formed, as well as the changing logic and crisis of the modern state mechanism in the Pahlavi era. Finally, we conclude by attempting to demonstrate the truthfulness ot the following three propositions:1. Although the modern state was based intensively on a centralistic project, a project which opposed and denied the semi-colonial rule inherited by the old feudal system, but in the process of its transformation the modern state adopted a patrimonialistic character. This character was rooted in the employment of local powers which was based on old affiliations and loyalties between the Court-Army complexes.2. The initial patrimonialistic structure of the modern state made its endurance dependent on reproduction and renewal of the Court's intercessional role between these tendencies: centralistic bureaucratic modernism and regional pseudo-traditional conservatism.3. The crisis of the modern state mechanism in the Pahlavi era was rooted in the inability of the Court in formalizing and institutionalizing this intercessional role. As a result we conclude that the Pahlavi regime was a pseudo-patrimonial one. Not only the tendency of Pahlavi kings to rule arbitrarily, but also was their fall the result to pseudo-patrimonialism, or deficient fulfillment of patrimonialism.

Globalization is an economic process striving to create a relative uniformity in cultural consumption, thus it seeks creation of new markets for the same mass products, and an increase in financial and corporative gains. Nonetheless, the homogenizing process of globalization gradually is facing instances of tough resistance in the form of disobedient sub-cultures and different visions of communitarianism. The worldwide cultural revitalization enforces ethnic and identity discourses which strongly resist acculturation attempts put forward mainly by the Western cultures. Thus, despite these pressures, in reality a rigid resistance has been shaped worldwide, within the past twenty years, through the re-birth of ethnic and communitarian entities which are adamantly after reinforcing their own identity attachments to avoid cultural omission. Such a re-birth has, in turn, created vast markets which can be called ethnic-communitarian markets. These markets present identity-communitarian goods, otherwise they use their identity-communitarian attachments to propagate or sell thier products.Iran encompasses diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups. Considering the strong and deep ties between the Iranian national identity and its variant local identities, Iran possesses great potentials in the area as described above. The present paper, based on findings of a meta-analytical project, attempts to demarcate these potentialities within the framework of indices and Iran's global standing. These capacities are explored among four Iranian ethnic groups chosen for this survey, which are the Iranian Arabs, Azeris, Blooches, and Kurds. The cultural goods we consider are defined in three domains of tourism, media, and food. The final aim of this paper is to facilitate a more articulated, and less strained, relations between three levels of identity in the modern world: global, national, and local.This paper is part of a research project sponsored by Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the winter of 2005.

Pursuant to the spread of drug addiction in Iran in the 1960's, and mounting pressure exerted from the Iranian public and the international organizations, the government was forced to adopt a more strict legislative criminal policy against drug trafficking. The adoption of such a policy went through different stages throughout its history. To express its strict stance against drug trafficking, the government initially introduced capital punishment code in the domain of narcotic drugs crimes, and then carried out the sentence in the 1970's and 1980's on a large scale. Nonetheless, beginning in early 1990's the government decided to reduce the cases of capital punishment in the code, in an effort to adjust its criminal policy. This new lenient policy has been affected by the judicial criminal policy. In other words, the resistance of judicial criminal policy against the legislative criminal policy has led the latter to lean toward more leniencies. Of the influential cases, we can refer to the jurisprudence, especially the prominent role of the Supreme Court, law enforcement forces, anti-drug staff, and finally public attitude toward capital punishment in drugs crimes. These developments have set forth a hopeful prospect regarding the adoption of a more reasonable procedure in relation to capital punishment for drugs crimes.The present paper examines the aforementioned developments comparatively and analytically, using the library method.