Sociological Analysis of the Failure of Agricultural Joint-Stock Companies Following Land Reforms

Land reforms can be regarded as the most significant event of the past century in Iranian agrarian society, which is debated from a variety of expert perspectives. One of the complementary policies of land reforms was the unsuccessful establishment of communal exploitation units such as agricultural joint-stock companies.This qualitative study investigates the process of agricultural joint-stock company exploitation systems disintegrating. The data was gathered through open and semi-structured interviews with 15 members, shareholders, and involved individuals of the Rudpish agricultural joint-stock company in Fuman, and then analyzed and described using the method of theme analysis.Prior to their establishment, companies faced sociocultural, economic, subsistence, and legal issues encompassing ignorance, involuntary (forced) participation, unknown benefits and profits, and ownership, according to the findings of this study. Socio-cultural, technical, legal, and organizational issues including social rejection, inflexibility, managers’ lack of interaction with people, shareholders’ feeling of powerlessness, failure in stabilization of modern techniques, changing contracts of companies and farmers multiple times, a sense of dispossession, a lack of an effective reward and punishment system, unskilled managers and employees, and a lack of an effective trustee system plagued the companies after their establishment.The current study demonstrates that disregarding the cultural conditions and experiences of local people, disregarding their ownership, and failing to plan to obtain social trust – which is essential to the social capital required for the success of any local development plan – will result in the failure of efforts to create new exploitation systems.