نشریه دین و ارتباطات
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (پاییز و زمستان 1385)

Mahestan is a shopping centre located in the City of Karaj in west part of Tehran. This building has been constructed based on idea of making connection and friendship between all those elements which considered as a very contradictional issues. Traditional elements belong to 1000 historical heritage of Iranian/Islamic architecture has been amalgamated with high-tech elements of modern architecture such as rotating restaurant, panorama elevator and many advanced modern elements of building construction. This paper is a cultural and semiological decodification of overt and covert meanings existed in the building. For such a decodification, long history of architecture tradition in Iran has been reviewed and at the same time by cultural studies approach many unseen factors of what said and what not said in the building brought into discussion. Mahestan is an example of nostalgic portrayed of Iranian culture, a culture which look for progress and tradition at the same time.

This paper is an epistemological attempt to bring to attention the problem of real self and its intervention in production of theoretical knowledge. This will be done through a search into how it is handled in current Iranian life-world as we approach it from an Iranian scholarly point of view. Based on these preliminary postulates, the paper first refers to the statement that reality in fact is an interpretation of real self of human beings. The paper also indicates that all realities are depended upon the meaning that takes shape in inner world of humans. In that sense, human beings are producers of meaning and searchers of meaning and reality is nothing more than a meaning. Based on this logic, reality is a contemplated or a reflexive meaning which is fabricated by relations of knowledge and power and is entrenched in the course of history. This process takes place in a way that what is fabricated presents itself to everyone as a natural real matter. In this sense, elites of knowledge and power are the founders of fabricated realities and who gradually affect masses of every society. Social masses are in themselves uncontemplated and non-reflexive real selves or bodies whose ability to contemplate has been taken away from them by the dominant knowledge and power hegemony. This hegemony imposes, instead some other patterns on them based on which they develop a tradition of how to imitate and how to follow rather than how to produce. It is for this reason that we can conclude that realities don’t have essential validity. Intellectual and cultural experiences of individuals are the only valid realities and are built by the real self. We conclude that real self therefore is a comparing tool of self with other at the individual and social scales. In the end we will refer to attempts made by Iranian academic world in order to extend our logic over to the question of what shortcomings can be seen in production of theoretical knowledge in Iranian academic atmosphere that hinders the process of production of knowledge.

Tourism is a process of practice and experimentation, and this is clearly shown by its history. Civilizations’ outlooks determine kids of tourism so that one could interpret the meaning of this fact according to the predominant ideologies in every civilization. The article tries to prove this by relying on the Iranian civilization and its various historical contexts. It can be useful for programming and policy-making in the field and if neglected we would face disturbances (some of them have already occurred) in our endeavors. The main approach of the article is based on the Iranian historical anthropology.

In this article, possible sampling in Sociological Survey with the intention of understanding population features according to representative factors, the quality and extent of reliability of its representative ness, and statistical deductions are discussed. Then, the methods of choosing possible sampling are given and finally possible sampling and impossible sampling are compared and their efficiency in understanding population features and their experimental accuracy are examined.

Getting access to basic services such as health care and education constitutes an indication of development. Cities, as major residential centers, should provide such facilities for citizens of all social classes. The civic management plays a big role in developing cities and decreasing the gaps among people, so we need an accurate assessment of its success in this regard. Despite the existence of appropriate methods for the assessment of economic organiztion’s achievements, studies show the complexity of this for local governments. Management and sociology are two scientific areas dealing with the assessment. In the first, two topics are discussed, namely the efficiency and its indicators. In the second, the social capital theory is a matter of consideration. The present study has made use of the "fundamental theory" qualitative approach for the evaluation of the council’s performances. To this end, the assessment models already used by researchers in the above-mentioned areas have been extracted. Then a sociological model for the performance assessment has been designed with due consideration of the opinions expressed by city councillors. In this model the most important indicators have been proposed on the basis of the involved individuals whose views differ from managers and researchers in relation to local governments.

The central aim of this paper is to show how interviews with people, particularly of ex-leading businessmen, and dominant strata concerning their role in the political and economic history assist to create an unique oral archive and a significant source for preparing biographies. For this reason the paper analyses the contents, products and methodologies of some Iranian oral history projects which have created significant source to study their role in the political and economic history of Iran during the Pahlavi period (1940-1979). The paper reviews the process of these projects, i.e., formal agreement, interview procedure, single phase interview, recollection about others, processing, preservation and increasing objectivity, etc. The paper will argue that the collections of oral history are immensely significant in helping us to understand the key periods in global history during the last century. The paper likewise maintains that oral history projects are exceptionally timely, not only because of current changes in global history, but because the experiences of many of the people involved in political, social and economic activities should be collected and their recollections of those tumultuous years of their life should be recorded and made available to future generations of scholars in various formats.

The issue of people’s participation, once held to be an intellectual necessity for development, has now turned into an ethical and human necessity. It is of such importance that it has recently been called the aim of development. In the developmental models of the seventies and eighties in developing countries, people’s participation had a high status. Those decades could also be called “government - directed participation era” a salient feature of which was inciting people to cooperate. From the mid- eighties onward, the governments’ efficiency in development was put under question in developing countries, hence the emphasis was directed towards a new model known as non- governmental which meant the promotion of NGOs or the third sector. This newly- emerged sector had as its aim such things like charity activities and was engaged in manifold roles including the execution, completion or even prevention of governmental projects. The developing countries’ regimes may have boasted of benefiting from the third sector or they may have flauntingly helped its progress. But some humanitarian functions of the NGOs have shown to be in conflict with the ideological and absolutist demands of those regimes. This article surveys the aspects, status and importance of non- governmental and participatory organizations in development and their relation to governments.