a response to the problem of irans backwardness preoccupied the minds of intellectual and political forces. since irans failure from russia while different domestic and external factors caused to defeat, differend and even contending views concerning irans backwardness played a key role in these failures. these diverse and contending views which arised at first in compilation of laws and establ...

Constance Flanagan and Peter Levine survey research on civic engagement among U.S. adolescents and young adults. Civic engagement, they say, is important both for the functioning of democracies and for the growth and maturation it encourages in young adults, but opportunities for civic engagement are not evenly distributed by social class or race and ethnicity. Today's young adults, note the au...

Political researchers point to church activities as a major avenue for lower-class individuals to learn the civic skills necessary for many forms of political participation, the skills that higher-status individuals learn through education and occupation. This article tests this theory through multilevel analyses of the effects of both individual income and average congregational income on thre...

This paper examines how institutional trust affects the way in which people process information and perceive risk. Data come from a study of risk perception in the circumstance of US state health department investigations of suspected cancer clusters, with 30 cases examined (n = 1,111). Trust is assessed for three information sources: state health departments, civic groups and industries involv...

The latter part of the 20th century was a period characterized by a fundamental transition in scholarship on activity and the aging process. Theory emphasizing the inevitable decline of human capacity was gradually replaced with concepts stressing positive, multidimensional views of aging. In this article, we highlight the key contributors and trace the origins and overlapping themes of success...

It has been conventional to conceptualize civic life through one of two core images: the citizen as lone individualist or the citizen as joiner. Drawing on analyses of the historical development of the public sphere, we propose an alternative analytical framework for civic engagement based on small group interaction. By embracing this micro-level approach, we contribute to the debate on civil s...

Recent narratives of the civil rights movement document black veterans’ contributions to the movement’s success, often attributing their efforts to their military experience. While this attribution makes sense intuitively, alternative explanations for black veterans’ mobilization are not fully explored in existing work. For instance, black veterans were often among the most active members in ma...

Collaborative approaches to community health improvement such as healthy cities and communities have the potential to strengthen community capacity through leadership development. The healthy cities and communities process orients existing local leadership to new community problem-solving strategies and draws out leadership abilities among residents not previously engaged in civic life. In an e...

This paper aims to develop a complex articulation of the civic meaningfulness of voluntary work that clarifies its political importance as a countervailing narrative pointing beyond dominant neoliberal and consumptive articulations of a good life. To start with, it sketches a hermeneutic perspective on civic meaningfulness based on the work of Paul Ricoeur. Subsequently, it introduces the ideas...