| چکیده انگلیسی مقاله |
One of the main axes of the modern state-nation building policy in Iran during the Pahlavi era was the modernization of social identity based on the idea of homogenization. In this regard, the government initiated policies to define and establish a coordinated and uniform temporal order in state institutions and the public sphere of society, thereby monitoring the rhythm of government and societal activities. The modernizing Pahlavi state, by setting the official time to Tehran's horizon within the mechanisms of world time based on Greenwich Mean Time and synchronizing the time across all geographical regions of Iran with it, imposed its desired temporal order on the country's governmental, social, and economic institutions. This was achieved through the coordinating fu ctions of state institutions such as the telegraph office, municipality, and army, as well as administrative and legal measures. Consequently, it created a type of nationwide, coordinated, and uniform temporal identity for society. Introduction To understand the growing importance of time as a historical subject, one must consider its evolution in human society from the dawn of the modern era to the widespread adoption of modern ideas and institutions. In modern society, both micro and macro aspects of life are influenced by precise temporal patterns and structures. These precise patterns, established by governments through laws with various political and economic motivations and implemented using mechanical clock technology, have penetrated many areas of people's lives since the early modern period, giving direction to society. In modern mechanical mathematical thinking, the 24-hour time became a standard and measure in new culture and society. Natural time, with the help of precise new time-measuring tools - mechanical clocks that made time countable in minutes and adjustable by hand using mathematical measurement units and mechanical technology - transformed into a technological idea around which all human actions in the new civilization were calculated, conceptualized, and valued. What added to the importance of the element of time and the extent of its influence in the modern era was its complete intertwining with the element of space, as these two in the modern era gained meaning in interaction with each other and give meaning to each other in the concept of efficiency. The tangible representation of such a relationship between time-saving and reducing the distance between places, which was linked to mechanical technologies with the logic of profit and loss, becomes very prominent for governments and political and economic powers. They strive to establish their desired temporal rules in the societies under their control, to achieve the most profit and efficiency in human and industrial actions in the shortest time, and to use it to improve the quality of governance at all levels and increase its durability. Based on this model, one can examine the efforts and actions of modernizing governments like the Pahlavi regime in early 20th century Iran, which sought to modernize society, to understand why they strived to establish a solid and stable temporal order and compel everyone to obey and synchronize with this uniform modern temporality. Therefore, it can be said that the process of evolving social formations in relation to the policies of governing institutions in using modern technologies such as mechanical clocks to institutionalize modern culture is an attractive realm for research in the history of modernity in Pahlavi-era Iranian society. On this basis, the question of the present article is: How were the foundations and process of formation of government policies and implementation of programs in the Pahlavi era for defining and establishing official time in the state's administrative system and Iranian social spheres developed? Materials and Methods This research aims to reconstruct the historical development of these policies and programs, and to examine, in light of the foundations of modern temporality, the standardizing and coordinating functions of these programs in achieving the goals of the Pahlavi government's authoritarian modernization agenda. However, answering this question and issue is not possible without considering the foundations of modern temporality in the global history of modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries, and its penetration through modern time-oriented technologies in Iranian society from the Qajar to Pahlavi eras. This is a topic that, unlike other aspects of state and societal modernization in the Pahlavi era, has received very little attention from both Iranian and foreign scholars of contemporary Iranian history, and has only been addressed sporadically, with a focus on the importance of work hours in factories and the lives of workers, as in Touraj Atabaki's book "The State and the Subaltern: Authoritarian Modernisation in Turkey and Iran". In contrast, the research literature on the processes of modernization and their political, social, and cultural foundations in Western societies, centered on the changing relationship between state and nation, has produced numerous works that are used in this article as a conceptual model to elucidate the foundations, objectives, and consequences of the official standardization of modern time in Pahlavi Iran, which are presented as the basis for the discussions in this paper. The data that has provided the basis for the aforementioned research primarily consists of a collection of documents and records from the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods in the field of timekeeping and work hours, the classification, examination, and analysis of which has enabled the authors, with a view to the existing examples in predominantly European studies, to construct a systematic and structured representation, and present it in the form of a specific research project. It is worth noting that the combination of the historical research method, the existing foreign examples, and the authors' ideas has given a particular form to the raw information available in this field, resulting in a novel understanding of the time-oriented approach to everyday life in a specific period, and the efforts of the established government to institutionalize and exploit it. Results and discussion The examination of the available documents and records from the early Pahlavi period regarding modern temporality, the official clock, and the new mechanical clock, and their analysis, reveals that during the Pahlavi era, the government, through precise and calculated direction of the widespread use of modern timekeeping in the Iranian government and society, which had already begun, and by investing time and resources, sought to implement policies and programs that ultimately made governance and the advancement of modernization objectives much easier for it, due to the order and discipline it brought to administrative and social affairs. The standardization envisioned by the government, which was carried out in the realm of clocks and through the governmental tools at its disposal in society, resulted in positive outcomes for the government's authority. These included increased productivity in various government sectors, social order, penetration into different spheres of people's lives, and guiding them towards modern economic, social, and cultural actions, ultimately leading to increased power and control of the government in managing society. The government, through the establishment of an official clock and the subsequent development of a legal and regulatory mechanism, organized the work hours of society and gained control over the temporal rhythm of the geographical area under its rule. It should be noted that these measures did not occur suddenly and did not immediately produce results, but rather a movement that had begun in the previous decades was placed on a specific path of harmonizing the time of Iran's geographical regions with the Tehran horizon during the early Pahlavi period, and through the government's attention and coordinated actions, with the definition of the official clock, this came to fruition. As a result, the administrative structure and social relations were gradually and through the use of various tools, aligned and standardized in the modern temporal rhythm desired by the reformist Pahlavi government, and Iranian society slowly became one with a new, centralized, organized, and uniform time-oriented mindset. Conclusion It could be said that the standardization of work hours during the early Pahlavi period and the government's control over the temporal pulse of society through it, was one of the most critical modernizing steps in constructing a new form and content of national time centered on the horizon of Tehran, as one of the foundations of the Iranian nation-state. The government, with the help of its legislative and executive branches, and through cohesive and specific programs and actions, was able to achieve this and take a step closer to the formation of a modern Iranian social identity, which was the goal of Iran's modernization agenda. By standardizing the work clock and establishing control over the temporal rhythm of society, the Pahlavi government was able to shape a new conception of national time and temporality, one that was centered on Tehran and aligned with the modernist vision of the nation-state. This was a crucial element in the government's broader project of socio-cultural transformation, as the regulation of time and the synchronization of temporal practices across the country helped consolidate a sense of shared national identity and facilitated the implementation of other modernization initiatives. The government's ability to impose this new temporal order, backed by its legislative and administrative powers, demonstrates how the control and standardization of time could serve as an important tool of state-building and social engineering in the early 20th century Iranian context. Through these measures, the Pahlavi regime sought to remake Iranian society according to its vision of modernity, with the homogenization of time and the entrenchment of a Tehran-centric temporal framework playing a key role in this broader transformative project. |