Media and Society in Iran

Abstract

This special edition of The Asian Journal of Social Sciences presents the think ing of a number of contemporary Iranian scholars on issues mostly related to media and religion, and on current thoughts surrounding contemporary socio-economic issues in Iran. The papers reflect a thorough overview of aca demic works in the disciplines of social sciences, including communication, sociology and anthropology. These types of analyses are absent in the west and/or in many other societies where they are being affected by ill-treated analyses on contemporary Iran. Hamid Abdollahyan and Mohammad Reza Javadi Yeganeh from the University of Tehran are the Journal's consulting edi tors for this special issue. Their insights in compiling the papers and working through all stages with us helped us to offer an overall insight into contempo rary and the papers that are included were selected after a thorough peer review process. The first paper, by Hamid Abdollahyan and Hooshang Neyebi, is titled Conceptualizing Occupational Prestige: An Empirical Case Study from Iran, and deals with the question of social stratification from an Iranian point of view. In approaching this topic, the authors use Davis and Moor's 1945 theory of social stratification and provide a modified version of the theory to deal with the changing stratification in Iran. They argue that social stratifi cation has a functional necessity in any complex society in the sense that no position is expected to remain vacant and the society's norms draw quali fied people into positions. They also argue that social stratification is concep tually distinct from other social inequalities such as Marx's social classification. They also claim that prestige structure is representative of stratification. Based on such postulates they go on to examine how various jobs are ranked by Iranians.