A Study on Social Mobility in Post-Revolutionary Rural Iran

Rural reforms have been an important part of the post-revolutionary government policy. The government implemented various rural development programs to develop rural areas – mostly with an ideologically populist and egalitarian-oriented character. Development policies in general and rural reforms in particular are considered as a major process towards weakening the rigidity of rural social structure and producing number of positions and openness circumstances. This paper intends to explore the impact of the post-revolutionary rural programs on the occupational mobility of rural people through using ex-post-facto comparative method in the selected villages. It concludes that the mobility tended to be higher in the villages that received the most rural programs than those which received fewer or no programs. There was a higher inclination to self-recruitment in intra-generational mobility compared with intra-generational mobility. Most of the observed mobility, both upward and downward, was short range and oriented towards the adjacent category.