Iranian Journal of Sociology

Abstract How do students play in student organizations? How do the games that students play in student organizations help them to transend the situation? In addition, how do students take advantage of this transcendence to achieve, differentiate, and produce a distinctive culture? These are the questions that have been answered in this article after a phenomenological conceptualization of the concept of play and conducting research using observation techniques and focus groups on students active in student organizations at the University of Tehran. The main purpose of this article is to interpret the mechanisms of differentiation and production of a specific student culture in student organizations. It seems that the most important strategy to differentiate student organizations is to play games that in this article are interpreted as Ludic games. The distinction is made by playing such games on two levels: one between students active in student organizations and other students, and the other between student organizations themselves. This article tries to explain how to differentiate between these two levels. In the first level, students differentiate themselves by creating play organizations with others, and in the second level, by creating playful competition and producing distinctive symbols.

Abstract  
The present article aims to study and analyze the advent of new middle class in Iran society via studying different lifestyle indices such as architecture, social relationships, and leisure time in order to clarify new middle class members’ thoughts, values, and worldview in the first Pahlavi era.
To carry out the research in this direction, it was designed to employ historical method and qualitative content analysis focusing on architecture and literature as two salient fields, and analyze different primary and secondary sources such as books, novels, reports, and etc. Based on the findings of research, considering architecture evolution and reviewing selected novels of that time indicate the advent of new middle class and its distinctive lifestyle in the first Pahlavi era. The review and analysis of collected information indicate individualism, nationalism, and modernism as the most crucial categories which illustrate new middle class values and worldview in the first Pahlavi era.
 
 
 

Abstract This article deals with the culture and lifestyle of the upper class in Iran. In this study, the upper class is defined by one's occupation, income, location of residence, house, and car model. We used thematic analysis of the qualitative method. In addition, we selected 22 people as our research sample and carried out semi-structured interviews. Moreover, the concepts of lifestyle and culture were defined based on the theory of Bourdieu, Veblen, and Eliot. Research findings demonstrated that the Iranian upper class has low cultural knowledge and literacy, multi-tastes, and cultural ambivalence. Therefore, it is hard to identify a typology of a distinct lifestyle.