Introducing Indigenous Model of Civil Society in Islamic Republic of Iran

Subject Areas :

Abolhassan Faghihi ¹ , Mashallah Valikhani Dehaghani ²

1 - ( [e-mail]) - استاد و عضو هیأت علمی گروه مدیریت دولتی دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد علوم و تحقیقات تهران
2 - ([e-mail]) - دکتری مدیریت دولتی دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد علوم و تحقیقات تهران

Received: 2011-08-16 Accepted : 2011-12-17 Published : 2011-09-01

Keywords: Participation, Democracy, Civil Society, ruling,

Abstract :

The civil society is one of those topics which has attracted the attention of many thinkers and different discipline like law, political science, economy, management and sociology are covered by this topic. The civil society is that part of social life which is organized, voluntary, independent from government and based on legal system or rules which is accepted to the participants. The civil society is a public sphere between the government and citizens in which the dialogues and processes, activities, movements and organized social institutions exist in an autonomous and voluntary shape on the basis of a systematic rule. The civil society in the direction of its function acts in support of government and strengthens it. It also can oppose the government when it violates the rights of the citizens. The present article tries to answer this question that how the indigenous model of civil society is in Islamic Republic of Iran and what are its characteristics? For attaining this model the researcher first extracted a set of effective elements from theoretical debates and literature of research, and then they have drafted the first and preliminary model and in this regard made use of Delphi method in three stages. In the first stage of Delphi the view point of observers about suitability of these elements have been collected and they have been asked if possible add more elements to them or reduce some of them. In this direction the main aspects of civil society like participation, rule of law, clarity, efficiency and effectiveness, accountability, acceptance of responsibility, justice and bringing consensus along with their determinants and indexes are determined and other indexes were added to the first model by the observers. In the second stage of Delphi the observers have decided the degree of importance of each element along with the new indexes and the average of first stage answer. In the third stage of Delphi for the reason that all the elements have been considered important from the view point of the members, hierarchical method of analysis was employed to determine the coefficient of importance, their relative weight and the degree of their impact. At the end the conceptual model has been introduced and explained.