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Introduction
- Syracuse University Press
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1 Introduction Roksana Bahramitash and Hadi Salehi Esfahani In the winter of 2004 Roksana Bahramitash attended a nationwide conference in Tehran where workers, employers and entrepreneurs, and government officials came together to address issues such as wages and unemployment. The conference was heavily influenced by the International Labor Organization’s (ILO’s) commitment to the concept of Decent Work. Following the conference an ILO representative gave a lecture at the Ministry of Work and Social Welfare. After the lecture, Bahramitash and a former colleague who was then working with the ILO drove to another seminar. On the way, a discussion about the issue of female employment in Iran started during which Bahramitash and the ILO representative (a native Iranian) shared their frustration over Western conceptions of Iranian women’s international image. The discussion revolved around the difference between outsiders’ images of Iran and the reality of the country, a point of sympathy between her and the ILO representative who, like her, traveled to Iran on a regular basis and was up-to-date about the changes taking place over the past few decades. Like so many visitors, he admitted that the Western media’s portrayal of Iran paints a dark picture of women in the country. For many Westerners the differences between Iran and Iraq or even Saudi Arabia are minor details, irrelevant to how they view the country in question. For the most part Iran is portrayed as a hotbed of radical Islam, a place of misogyny and retrograde views that belong to the Middle Ages. While it is true that the position of 2 • Veiled Employment women—particularly middle-class women—has suffered as a result of the Islamization process that occurred after the Iranian revolution , the situation of Iranian women is far more nuanced and complex than is often assumed outside of the region. Development/Modernization Development studies emerged as a distinct area of research in the aftermath of World War II. The sociological basis of this new field was modernization theory, inspired by structural functionalism and the work of the prominent sociologist of the postwar era Talcott Parsons. Development/modernization prescribed social transformation of previously colonized and semicolonized countries (which were now called the Third World) from traditional to modern. This transformation has been viewed primarily as unidirectional and evolutionary , operating through a market economy. In the case of the mainstream academia in Western countries generally and the United States in particular, and during the Cold War, development studies and modernization theory were preoccupied with the growing popularity of Socialist ideas. During the same time, in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, modernization had already been fully embraced, and the only difference was that this policy was carried out by the ruling Communist Party and through heavy-handed government programs. These programs , in some cases harsh, did accelerate industrialization and economic growth in the Soviet Union for a while, especially during the 1930s when the Western world was suffering from the Great Depression . The initial economic success of the Soviet programs added to the political appeal of socialism in the Third World and became a threat to the hegemony of Western powers. This threat strengthened the view in the West that more economic growth was needed in the Third World to counter the proliferation of Socialist tendencies in those countries. Although the belief in economic development through private markets remained strong in the West, the experience of the Great [44.203.235.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:03 GMT) Introduction • 3 Depression and the growth in the Soviet Union gave rise to the view that markets left to themselves might not have been ideal and that extensive government interventions were needed to foster growth, especially in low-income countries. John Maynard Keynes’s macroeconomic theory and the perspectives on economic growth developed after World War II—such as Paul Narcyz Rosentein-Rodan’s idea of “Big Push” (1943), Arthur Lewis’s “dual economy” (1955), and W. W. Rostow’s “stages of economic growth” (1956)—all suggested crucial roles for the government in inducing growth through rapid industrialization. In particular, the import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategy, which was often combined with extensive government controls and state ownership of enterprises, became quite popular in Third World countries. Emphasis on rapid industrialization also entailed commercialization of agriculture and the transfer of its labor and other resources to industrial production. The ISI strategy was successful in generating growth for a while in many developing countries, especially the...