Iranian Journal of Sociology
Year:2012 | Volume:12 | Issue:4|Papers Count:7

The focus of this paper is the new middle class's role in the democratic demands of Pahlavi's dynasty. The research problem is to discuss the new middle class central role in the emergence and growth of democratic demands. As to the proof of this problem and as to the manner of analyzing the impact of the new middle class (the independent variable) on the democratic demands of the Pahlavi dynasty (the dependent variable) quantitative analysis and statistics related to demographic developments have been used. Findings show that a positive relationship exists between democracy and the new middle class and new middle class is a prerequisite for democracy.The requirements for a modern democracy show that all of the values of a democracy are meaningless without the middle class. The emergence of these values requires legitimacy among the majority of people it appears that such legitimization needs appropriate social context for the institutionalization of democratic culture. Such values cannot be realized because the traditional society and the modern two-class system (upper - lower), lacks the necessary preconditions. The new middle class for achieving their demands depends on the existence of a democratic system. Only the system can afford to meet the fluid demands of the people all of which are the secondary needs. Based on these theoretical apparatus, the results indicate that whenever the new middle-class range is relatively wide, the incidence and the emergence of democratic demands are also greater.

The purpose of this research was to identity thirty outstanding events of the Islamic Revolution of Iran that ossurred in the great city of Tehran, from the beginning of the Islamic Revolution till the overthrow of the Pahlavi Regime, and from the coming to power of the revolutionaries till the foundation and establishment of Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). To achieve this aim, it was necessary to determine the outset of the revolutionary movement, the time of the establishment of the IRI, various types of revolutionary events from the beginning till the overthrow of the regime, and from then to the establishment of IRI, the criteria for evaluation of the significance of various types of the revolutionary events in each of the two stages of the revolutionary process. In this research, after determining of the time of the outset of the revolutionary movement and the establishment of IRI, two theoretical frameworks were constructed in order to classify revolutionary events of each stage of the revolution. Then, through the operational definition of the events of each stage, 124 categories of revolutionary events were found (49 categories for the first stage, and 75 for the second). By identification of the types and categories of the revolutionary events, and using thematic content analysis of the gathered documents, the revolutionary events of the great Tehran were extracted. From this part of the research, 1895 revolutionary events for the first stage, and 2083 revolutionary events for the second stage of the Islamic Revolution were obtained. Afterwards, through the operational definition of the significance of various types of revolutionary events, the degree of importance of the events was calculated. Finally, after balancing the significance of various types of revolutionary events, for each of the two stages of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran 16 most significant events that second highest were identified. These 32 events are recognized in the paper as the most outstanding events of the Islamic Revolution in the great Tehran.

The automobile has a short cultural history in the Iranian life-style, yet within this short period the automobile has been transformed from a rare, aristocratic and luxury good into a mass consumer commodity. The automobile is present in our lives and poses itself not only as a metallic appearance but as a conceptual entity, that is, as a sign or symbol. In contemporary life, concepts and phenomena such as friendship, love, family, travel, work, recreation, school, university, leisure, street, city, roadsthese are all tied up with signs of cars. The sound of the machine has become the background noise of our life and sometimes its close ties with common kinds of pollution such as those of air and noise, environmental damage, accidents resulting in injuries or deaths, makes us to worry and to compromise our health and vitality.The objective of this paper is to set forth perspectives advanced by cultural studies and cultural sociology as well as those came about via empirical assessment of the objects known as cars seen together as a cultural phenomenon in the Iranian everyday life. The empirical content of the paper is provided through documentary study of contemporary literary and historical works and sometimes by observation and noting. The paper, upon reviewing certain theoretical perspectives, deals firstly with the emergence of unfamiliar phenomenon of the automobile in the Iranian life and then tackles representations of the Iranian contradictory experiences with car, on the one hand, representing hope, liberation and development and on the other hand as the symbol of destruction and deterioration-as these are represented in the literary texts. In the study, the cultural consumption of the car and its ties with everyday experiences of women, the youth and professional drivers will also be discussed. The final section of the article after a conclusion containing the contradictory cultural representations of car among the Iranians, deals with two political and economic points. These two points deal with the impact of cultural consumption of the automobile, ever since its industrial production as well as the influence it exerted on national decision making patterns in coping with the problem of traffic.

Social laziness is attributed to the Iranians and it has come to the general attention in recent years. There are some manifestations representing it in the society such as low work efficiency, abundance of holidays, overweight and lack of physical movement. Despite the importance of this issue, a direct sociological research has not been conducted on it. This paper attempts to study the number of factors influencing social laziness in the form of a concept in the framework of Rational Choice theory. This is a survey-method research conducted on 1256 residents of Tehran. The findings indicate that tendency for laziness in Tehran is at least %20. The interpretation of this finding expresses that the trend of tendency to laziness is not increasing. The most important factors influencing laziness in Multivariable Analysis is fatalism, sense of powerlessness and autonomy. The final finding indicates that low-level tendency toward laziness does not necessarily mean the actual low rate of its occurrence, because social conditions facilitates laziness in society.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) as a multivariate method for data analysis is spreading out gradually. The main aim of the article is to introduce the most popular and acceptable methods to sample size estimation (acceptable power of the null hypothesis test and the accuracy in estimation of the free parameters) that can be confident to the results of the free parameters estimation in a specified model. Moreover, introducing criteria and methods, which can be used by social researches to sample size determination and its adequacy assessment, is an added endeavor of the paper. Using general rules, in other words, rules of thumbs to estimate sample size are popular now. What these rules are is one of the questions that I try to answer in this article. Although, there are some advantages of the rules such as simplicity, but there are some deficiencies that ignoring them can lead to inaccurate or incorrect results. One of the most important of objections in using rules of thumbs is that the researchers could not be confident in a specific situation if there are enough sample size to parameter estimation from one hand, and the test of the analyzed model, on the other. In such situation, specifically when a given model is a complicated one, because of the number of observed variables, constructs and parameters and the pre-assumption of multivariate normality can be violated. As mentioned earlier, this disadvantage is more clearly observable. Satorra-Saris method which is founded on the test power and chi-square difference test (comparing a nested model with a mother one) and Monte Carlo method which is founded on the accuracy of free parameters, are some methods that can be used to assess sample size adequacy.