UC Berkeley

This dissertation demonstrates how poor youth in Iran manage to not simply survive, but to become socio-economically mobile given their limited opportunities. The study examines how poor young people's motivations and aspirations affect the strategies that they use to attain their goals. Social scientists have argued that poor people in the Middle East resist the consequences of large-scale economic restructuring by reasserting their power within extended family networks or maximizing their wealth by engaging in petty illegal practices. However, if we assume that these theoretical perspectives are correct, then we should expect that all poor young people in Iran would adopt similar practices in response to similar macroeconomic conditions. This study nevertheless finds that there are patterned differences in the ways that poor youth in the country think and react to their social worlds. Current theoretical perspectives, due to their exclusive focus on the poor's reactive acts of political agency, cannot provide explanations of how varying motivations inform how poor individuals move in their pursuits.

This dissertation draws from two years of ethnographic research in two urban capitals in Iran, Sari and Tehran, to examine the mechanisms involved in shaping poor young people's ideas of the good life and the strategies they use to attain them. The findings show how three, interrelated elements help to explain precisely how poverty influences individual and/or collective action: (1) the moral compass guiding poor youth, (2) their conceptions of the desirable that arise from this moral compass, and (3) the strategies they deploy to get their desires.

My findings suggest that poor youth adopt two moral systems that provide them with a sense of right and wrong and an evaluative code for conduct: that of honor and that of the Muslim work ethic (chapter 2). By enabling poor youth to lay claim to the respect that is accrued to the honorable, these moral systems provide them with an intangible route for social status as well as a unique scale that poor youth and their communities use to assess each other's honor. In this way, these two moral codes function as a type of stratification system hierarchy among youth in the lower classes.

While the moral codes of honor and work are the means by which individual character is sustained, they also influence poor young people's ideas of what constitutes the good life (chapter 3). While these wants are not much different from the desires of the Iranian middle class, the ends - either honor or prestige - that each group sees as salient for pursuit are key for explaining differences in outcomes between the two classes. Furthermore, different combinations of contingencies shape how successful poor youth are in realizing their pursuits. The tools that poor youth themselves bring to the table including their social contacts, street smarts and risk-taking abilities in combination with their limited opportunities for formal sector employment and beliefs in divine determinism operate to either facilitate or thwart poor young people's ability to get what they want.

In attempting to pursue their wants, poor youth deploy various strategies that revolve around accumulation and investment (chapter 4). Placing effort by accumulating and investing is consistent with these young people's adoption of the Muslim work ethic and the moral code of honor. For the former, effort is instrumental to socio-economic achievement; for the latter, undertaking strategies to escape poverty is critical for the young person to be able to support his family in order to maintain his honor and subsequently enhance his social standing. However, the presence of facilitating and constraining factors, not the least of which include the individual's place of residence, his/her familial ethos and his/her ability to take on moderate risks influence the extent to which the poor youth will be able to bring his/her efforts to fruition. Moreover, strategies such as accumulating capital to start a business or investing by participating in mutual exchange networks are contingent on the resources that the individual can bring into effect. As such, the individual's own initiative must be placed within the context of the social and economic resources that he can bring into his quest for upward mobility. For instance, while participating in gift-giving and exchange networks adds to the coffers of the poor youth, it only does so if the poor youth has been able to oblige his end of the reciprocal exchange. In this way, the success of a particular socio-economic strategy is dependent on the interaction between individual initiative and the resources that the poor youth has at his/her disposal for undertaking a particular course of action.

The findings of this dissertation show that attempts to explain the nature of poverty among poor youth in Iran cannot ignore the salient role that cultural systems play in shaping poor people's strategies of action. The strategies that poor young people deploy to better their lives emerge as a result of a particular type of social environment found in Iranian society that is centered on the dual pursuits of honor and work. Poor young people's strategies subsequently materialize as a cultural response that seeks to improve their social standing and economic positioning within this social world. Providing explanations of how individuals in the Middle East respond to poverty requires us to move beyond static theoretical perspectives of political agency and toward an understanding of the widely diverse nature of poor people's struggles that reflect the highly integrative nature of urban poverty. It is only by doing so that we can sharpen our theories of poverty to reflect how conditions of economic deprivation persist, how they provide a sense of purpose to actors who are caught in them, and how they can ultimately be overcome.