The sociological Study of Social Development Challenges in East Azerbaijan Province

The aim of the present study is to identify the challenges of social development in East Azerbaijan Province. The research method is a qualitative and the grounded theory approach is used as the operational method of the research. In order to collect the required data, a semi-structured interview was used. For this purpose, 22 experts and citizens of East Azerbaijan province were interviewed. The findings of the research indicate that, the identified challenges in this province are structural challenges (with the subcategories of centralization in provincial decision-making and weakness in budget allocation), cultural and social challenges (with the subcategories of lack of cooperation and knowledge gap), management challenges (with the subcategories of incorrect appointments, incomplete application of land use findings, poor management of transitions) and finally agency-oriented challenges (with the subcategories of individualism and lack of group participation, having an authoritarian personality, narrow-mindedness in social interactions, lack of feeling of belonging to the city(. In this article, the obtained central core is "social development management". This concept reflects the management issues and challenges in the development process of the East Azerbaijan province.