A Theoretical Analysis & Conceptualization of the Effects of Rentier States on Society's Agency and Structure and Urban Economy of Iran

The formation of Rentier states and dependency of national economy on natural resources is one of the greatest concerns of countries facing this phenomenon. Because Iran is one of these countries, many articles have been written about the effects of rentier states, but little endeavor has been made to combine these effects and theoretically conceptualize them. In this paper, at first, the Persian articles were chosen by keywords "rent", "oil" & "rentier state". After primary screening of articles by subjects, the articles for the purpose of this research were selected according to four criteria. Then, grounded theory procedures were applied on them- from open coding (line by line coding) to selective coding using Atlas.ti 6.0 Software. At the first step, grounded theory analysis resulted to three theories for explaining rentier state's effects, namely: 1) Rentier state leads to formation/increment of short-term mentality and self-benefit-orientation in people; 2) Rentier state weakens nation-state formation process; 3) Rentier state increases economic non-market orientation. At last, by combining these three theories, the final overarching theoretical conceptualization of the effects of rentier state indicates that: rentier state leads to formation/increasing of anti-sustainable development institutions. Finally, the effects of rentier state on urban economy were discussed based on the resulting theories.