CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Ghomashlouyan, Moslem |
|---|---|
| Title | Managing Change: Professorial State Relations of High-Ranking Bureaucrats from the Sociology Field in Iran |
| Summary | The present research focuses on a group of sociology professors who hold important positions in the state bureaucracy. In this stategraphy, I ask how these sociologists-cum-bureaucrats perceive their contributions to the political and bureaucratic field. I specifically inquire into the genealogy of their imaginations of the state with its surprising continuities starting from the first generation of sociologists in the late 1930s, that convinces them to contribute to and engage in state relations. Finally, I look into the realization of this state image through their own practices as bureaucrats. Drawing on one month of fieldwork, I contrastively describe Sociology professors who hold powerful, high-ranking positions inside the state bureaucracy, with Sociology professors who have never had such positions, and university students. I show how the bureaucratic pole of the field constitutes a social group that attempts to seize the state machinery to bring about reforms in society. Their image of the state is that the state is the single motor for reform and change, which convinces them to move from analyzing the state to working for and within the state bureaucracy, trying to translate their sociological understanding of the link between theory and practice into forms of engagement in bureaucracy. As such, this stategraphy sheds new light on the state-society relation by demonstrating how Iranian Sociology professors’ embeddedness in the field of Sociology and the intelligentsia at large significantly shapes their modality of work for the state. |
| Supervisor | Fabiani, Jean-Louis; Thiemann, Andre |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/ghomashlouyan_moslem.pdf |
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