Multiple Modernities and Fields for the Iranian Social Studies

Scientific sociology, in past two hundred years, has tried to achieve a single paradigm for its subject matter (Comte, Marx, Durkheim, and Parsons, for instance). Such efforts have so far failed. Today, it is doubtful whether there is a chance for such attempts. The emergence of approaches known as Multiple Modernities has mainly been responsible for development of such doubt in reaching a single explanatory paradigm. According to the Multiple Modernities theory, modernization in the Western manner is just one of the different ways of modernization. In this paper I try to design a theoretical basis for developing a preliminary frame for outlining the limits and possibilities of social studies in Iran. Of course, The Iranian social studies, as a field, must have its own contextual characteristics to follow. To reach the above-mentioned frame we have determined five characteristics for modern sociology from non-positivistic sociological perspective: it is cosmopolitan, discursive, reflexive and self-reflexive, ideological, and finally time diagnostic and narrative. Then, as a result of these features, we can provide four branches of social research in Iran: social change, social identity, religion and intellectual research.