ابراهیم توفیق

The status of the Institute of Social Studies and Research, which commenced operations in the 1950s as part of the Faculty of Literature at the University of Tehran, is a pivotal inquiry in academic sociology in Iran. The majority of studies examining the institute regard sociology as an extraneous discipline unrelated to the field.This article employs critical history and document analysis to demonstrate that an examination of this position is unattainable without knowledge of the social environment in which the institution originated.The society of Iran has been depicted. Conversely, by addressing this inquiry, we are able to discern not only the prevailing trends in Iranian sociology, but also the origins and indications of the frailty and distress that currently afflict Iranian social sciences. With respect to this matter, the majority of analysts have examined the historiography of academic sociology in Iran. However, this perspective is disproportionate to the materials of this history, as we shall demonstrate that their primary emphasis is on the viability or rejection of social sciences in Iran.The findings will demonstrate that this scholarly establishment originated from the social concerns and requirements of Iran, and that throughout its development, sociology in Iran attempted to provide solutions to these issues and necessities. Our research indicates that historical information regarding contemporary Iranian society cannot be discerned by focusing solely on external factors.

In recent years, the place of urban development plans and projects in the formation of Tehran's city space has been questioned more and more due to the increasing dominance of commercialism over this process and the subsequent decrease in the living capacity of the residents of Tehran. In the meantime, the prevailing opinion is that the reason for the failure of urban development plans was mostly due to the lack of urban management knowledge. Most of the historical researches about the city of Tehran have also studied the developments of the city of Tehran from the perspective of urban plans and plans in accordance with this image. With the aim of providing an accurate basis for planning, this article claims that such an idea of the city and urban management is not very consistent with historical facts and it is necessary to study and rewrite the history of the formation of Tehran more accurately with reference to the tensions within urban and national governance, recognition of the immigrant labor force population as an effective force on the formation of the program, as well as a rethinking of the common perception of the city of Tehran as a mere subordinate of “government policies”. Using the method of historiography and conceptualization of space, which is a set of relationships between forces and phenomena, the current historical research found the beginning of the formation of the current Tehran in the time period of 1945 to 1962 and shows that the space of Tehran, in its modern sense, is the intersection of three forces; Planning, business and daily life have emerged. According to the findings of the research, the transformation of the structure of planning and urban management in a horizontal, interactive way and by including all the main forces that create Tehran's space is the condition for exiting from the current crisis of Tehran's urban development planning.

This paper discusses the situation of social policy in Iran under the rule of the modern state through the spatial coverage of the social security system. The investigation using documentary and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has considered the inequality amongst provinces under the shadow of social security which in the recent century has led to a situation of the center-peripheries. Territorial centralism of the modern state and consequently the Tehran-axial which itself mutually fosters centralism and center-peripheral inequality, a system of planning from above and distribution of occupation opportunities, industry and services, and the allocation of social policy-making, economic and welfare resources based on the capital in the period of Pahlavi state and its continuation into the period of the Islamic Republic has resulted in spatial imbalance and reduction and stabilization of the political-economic and social situation of marginal regions which so-called the peripheries. Inequality and distance between regions in the shape of center-peripheries has led to the imbalance in the coverage of the social security system throughout the country since the social security system and its insurances expand following the cycle of industries, employment and services.

From the perspective of the security-oriented cultural discourse, culture has strategic importance for governance, because it is linked to security and development of society. From this point of view, cultural engineering is essential for creating a unified nation. A nation that is capable of reviving the Islamic civilization. Basically, this discourse sees the population as a raw material for nation-building and it will be a cause for concern if they are not. According to this discourse, the cultural policy is the most effective apparatus for turning people into subjugated individuals. In this research, genealogical methods have been used to understand the conditions that led to the formation of the discourse. The findings suggest that the failure of government in creating subjugated subjects leads to the dominance of a conservative approach to the cultural policy. Structurally, the ability of the government to create desirable subjects depends on the government's capacity to provide welfare to citizens. But in the post-war era, the economic reforms based on structural adjustment and the government's obligation to withdrawal of social policy led to widespread social exclusion. As a result, the subjectizing capacity of the state weakened drastically. Under these circumstances, social reality is seen as a threat to the eyes of the policy-making elite, resulting in intensifying the government's tendency to securitize and policing cultural policy to stand up to the threat.

This paper seeks to explicate "bio-resistance" in an interdisciplinary perspective inspired by political philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology. Here the concept of "bio-resistance" is formulated along the lines of thought drawn from an integrated reading of Spinoza and Deleuze. Using the genealogical method and the transcendental empiricism approach, this paper has also undertaken a historical study on the emergence of multitude as a product of the actualization of "bio-resistance". In the contemporary Iranian history, population as the multitude has been realized within the period between the collapse of the old and the blossoming of the new order during Constitutional Movement and Social Movements between1941 and 1953, as well as during in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In each of these moments, Anjumans, Unions, and Shuras can be regarded as forms of multitude which displayed the collective resistance of subaltern groups against "bio-power". "Existence" is the immanent cause of life, and human beings faced with dangers threatening their existence, tend to be united under a common destiny. "Bio-resistance" is thus a collective political activity in the service of self-preservation, made possible by the transformation of subjugated body-subjects into liberated ones in pure optical and sound situations. The results of this study guide us to three fundamental principles: 1. To exist is to resist; 2. Preservation of existence a political praxis; 3. There can be no individual liberation without a collective effort.

Technocracy and specialization are phenomena that are inevitable for the management of complex modern life. Modern governments, including the government of Iran, have taken technocratic measures to ensure the survival and legitimacy of society - such as the establishment of social insurance and social security organization. However, this organization is now facing a challenge from a technocratic point of view. This study, which was conducted with the theoretical approach of the government in society (Migdal), besides paying attention to the specificity of the issue in Iran,  has sought to understand and explain this challenge.

The research is based on method of grounded theory. Data was also collected through documentation and interviews, and the analysis was done qualitatively.

The results show that the challenge is related to internal and external organizational factors (other parts of the Executive Power and Government) both at present time as well as the previous decades of modern government evolution in Iran. In addition, the various branches of modern government, including the social security organization, are not necessarily aligned – whether in terms of the ups and downs of the technocracy challenge, or pursuing their own goals and interests.

This article aimed at examining the position of what is often described as Max Weber’s most important work “Economy and Society” in his thought. According to a Parsonian and totalizing reading of Weber, there is a break between an early Weber (a Weber focusing on methodological reflections on conceptualizing “Historical individual” and “The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism”) and a late Weber (a Weber focusing on “Economy and Society” and “Interpretative Sociology”); this break is based on a transition from historical individuality to sociology as an abstract, typological and universalizing science. In this text, I want to demonstrate that this transition is not a break but a tension-fraught continuity and that Weber’s thought (both early and late Weber) focuses on the different historical-individual formations of “modern capitalism” and “iron cage”. To do so, I will first review the history and structure of “Economy and Society”. Then, the before-mentioned transition will be examined. Then I will deal with the unavoidable tension in Weber’s thought in order to outline a critical and productive dialogue with him.

In this essay we have studied the emergence and genesis of the Nationalization of the Iran Oil Industry Movement from a sociological point of view. We have also analyzed the formation of The National Movement through new power relations among the internal forces of State, Society and International Capitalism. In doing so, Deleuze’s genealogy has been deployed to construct a framework to evaluate the issue critically. Firstly, we consider the subjective position of social forces, the relation between these forces, deformation of the old political order and re-formation of a new state amongst the contemporary discursive metamorphosis and the context in which the events of this movement occurred. Secondly, the peasants’ and laborers’ claims and regional desires to alter the power relationships and riddance from social subjugation have been analyzed genealogically. The multiple and fragmented origins of The National Movement, resulted from the relations between sociopolitical forces containing the multitude, the central state and world powers, have been scrutinized throughout this study. Furthermore we evaluate the convergences and divergences of The National State and The National Movement in the framework of the relation between institution and movement. The results of this study show that “The National Movement” at the beginning of the 50s emerged out of a rupture from the social forces liberation movement of the first half of the 40s, but the domination of the politics of representation over the affirmative metamorphosis of these forces undermined the potentials of the movement for altering the sociopolitical structures.

Tehran is a city which is being reproduced, constantly.This means that the contemporary Tehran  was formed when a new logic dominated  this reproduction process. This research studied the history of Tehran with a genealogical perspective to find the previous logics and make a clear image of contemporary order of the city, and how and why this order has been generated.
From 1989 with the changes in the government’s economic approaches, and in the urban management, a relation has been formed in which the city and space as commodities are being traded. This capitalistic relation is provided by suspension of urban rules. This new form of urban informality becomes possible with help of  the urban projects and the authority of management institutions like the Commission of the Fifth Article. Using the theory of urbanization of capital by David Harvey, and the theory of urban informality by Ananya Roy & Nezar AlSayyad, this research tries to analyze the new logic of Tehran and the role of effective factors and forces.

This article explores the ontological nuances of space in Simmel`s sociology. We have demonstrated how two different conceptions of space coexist in Simmel’s social thought. By reviewing his “sociology of space”, we have traced a Newton-Kantian absolute space in Simmel’s thought; while through investigating his social ontology, exemplified in concepts of sociation, social interaction, significance of number for social life, we have demonstrated how this ontology presumes a relational space. Excavating these two seemingly paradoxical notions of space, we have tried to find a resolution to this ambivalence. We have come to the conclusion that this ambivalence is generated by two different explanatory devices that Simmel uses to illustrate social life.

For years, one of the intellectual concerns in Iranian society has been to reassess Iranian society in its own unique historical context. The necessity of this re-examination was due to the dissatisfaction with the historical answers to the newly raised questions. Hence, to have proper answers to the questions posed concerning present Iranian society, a framework reflecting classic history, orient logy and discontinuity with the Foucault historical approach was employed. Mashallah Ajudani's perspectives are examined within this framework. Qualitative context analysis and Hermeneutic were analytical tools of this research. In the last section of this paper, a construct is sketched to illustrate the logic of theorist's perspectives. Findings were indicative of explanatory power of oriental list texts within the proposed sketched model. Based on this model, it becomes clear however, that the historical discontinuity of Iranian society could serve as a useful explanatory element in understanding social happenings in this country which is generally neglected in studies done so far.

Based on a speculative interpretation of the crisis of the social sciences in Iran, I pose in this article the questionwhether or not the theory of post-colonialism can be considered of help towards solving the problem or at least making the problematic of the crisis to be recognized. The crisis of the social sciences is an epistemological one and it appeared under the doubtless and absolute hegemony of modernization paradigm. The continuation and the hegemony of the paradigm of modernization, duringthe forming and evolving process of the social sciences, are rooted in the fact that the social sciences have kept being basically dependent upon the ruling constitutional and religious discourse formations central to the contemporary era.The discourse formations concerning the state and nation building processes are the results of either internalizing, or reversing of orientalist discourse. It gave rise to a system of such social sciences-based on a dichotomist conceptual apparatus-which reduces our plural histories of our experience of modernity to just encountering the tradition and modernity and as such makes its understanding impossible. In the final section of my article, I give an introductory explanation of the theoretical framework of post-colonialism, i.e.,a review of the context of its historical formation, its philosophical and methodological principles and the key concepts thereof.

This paper tries to criticize the linear (evolutionary) reading of Durkheim`s theory- which ignored all different histories in favor of dominant history-either at evolutionary material determination level or at the level of its approach to consciousness. For this reason by constructing the concept of gravity of mechanical solidarity proposes a dialectical relationship between various kinds of solidarity in different historical periods. This is primarily based on Giddens`s discontinuous interpretation of modern history and avoiding transitional period approach. Then in empirical level, by operationalzing the above concepts and applying quantitative methods in Tehran, the relationship between gravity of mechanical solidarity and abnormal forms has been examined. In so doing, the effect of particular concepts inscribed in abnormal forms on gravity of mechanical solidarity has been revealed. And several phenomena which previous readings were unable to explain or consider them as exceptional cases, has been conceptualized.