Explore the vast range of titles available.

With more than half its population under twenty years old, Iran is one of the world's most youthful nations. The Iranian state characterizes its youth population in two ways: as a homogeneous mass, \"an army of twenty millions\" devoted to the Revolution, and as alienated, inauthentic, Westernized consumers who constitute a threat to the society. Much of the focus of the Islamic regime has been on ways to protect Iranian young people from moral hazards and to prevent them from providing a gateway for cultural invasion from the West. Iranian authorities express their anxieties through campaigns that target the young generation and its lifestyle and have led to the criminalization of many of the behaviors that make up youth culture.In this ethnography of contemporary youth culture in Iran's capital, Shahram Khosravi examines how young Tehranis struggle for identity in the battle over the right to self-expression. Khosravi looks closely at the strictures confronting Iranian youth and the ways transnational cultural influences penetrate and flourish. Focusing on gathering places such as shopping centers and coffee shops, Khosravi examines the practices of everyday life through which young Tehranis demonstrate defiance against the official culture and parental dominance. In addition to being sites of opposition, Khosravi argues, these alternative spaces serve as creative centers for expression and, above all, imagination. His analysis reveals the transformative power these spaces have and how they enable young Iranians to develop their own culture as well as individual and generational identities. The text is enriched by examples from literature and cinema and by livid reports from the author's fieldwork.

Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: It must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based “purity” concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of moral cognition. It emerges in response to a key feature of cooperation, namely that cooperation is (ultimately) a long-term strategy, requiring (proximately) the self-control of appetites for immediate gratification. Puritanical moralizations condemn behaviors which, although inherently harmless, are perceived as indirectly facilitating uncooperative behaviors, by impairing the self-control required to refrain from cheating. Drinking, drugs, immodest clothing, and unruly music and dance are condemned as stimulating short-term impulses, thus facilitating uncooperative behaviors (e.g., violence, adultery, free-riding). Overindulgence in harmless bodily pleasures (e.g., masturbation, gluttony) is perceived as making people slave to their urges, thus altering abilities to resist future antisocial temptations. Daily self-discipline, ascetic temperance, and pious ritual observance are perceived as cultivating the self-control required to honor prosocial obligations. We review psychological, historical, and ethnographic evidence supporting this account. We use this theory to explain the fall of puritanism in western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, and discuss the cultural evolution of puritanical norms. Explaining puritanical norms does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation in our models of the moral mind.

We draw on eight different lab and field samples to delineate the effects of expressed humility on several important organizational outcomes, including performance, satisfaction, learning goal orientation, engagement, and turnover. We first review several literatures to define the construct of expressed humility, discuss its implications in social interactions, and distinguish expressed humility from related constructs. Using five different samples, Study 1 develops and validates an observer-report measure of expressed humility. Study 2 examines the strength of expressed humility predictions of individual performance and contextual performance (i.e., quality of team member contribution) relative to conscientiousness, global self-efficacy, and general mental ability. This study also reveals that with regard to individual performance, expressed humility may compensate for lower general mental ability. Study 3 reports insights from a large field sample that examines the relationship between leader-expressed humility and employee retention as mediated by job satisfaction and employee engagement as mediated by team learning orientation. We conclude with recommendations for future research.

Performing costly helpful behaviours can allow individuals to improve their reputation. Those who gain a good reputation are often preferred as interaction partners and are consequently better able to access support through cooperative relationships with others. However, investing in prosocial displays can sometimes yield social costs: excessively generous individuals risk losing their good reputation, and even being vilified, ostracised or antisocially punished. As a consequence, people frequently try to downplay their prosocial actions or hide them from others. In this review, we explore when and why investments in prosocial behaviour are likely to yield social costs. We propose two key features of interactions that make it more likely that generous individuals will incur social costs when: (a) observers infer that helpful behaviour is motivated by strategic or selfish motives; and (b) observers infer that helpful behaviour is detrimental to them. We describe how the cognition required to consider ulterior motives emerges over development and how these tendencies vary across cultures – and discuss how the potential for helpful actions to result in social costs might place boundaries on prosocial behaviour as well as limiting the contexts in which it might occur. We end by outlining the key avenues and priorities for future research.

Using the concepts of ethnic resilience and selective acculturation as a theoretical foundation, this study analyzes the effect of religion on the leisure behavior of Muslim immigrants to the U.S. The research project was based on 24 interviews that were conducted in the spring and summer of 2002 with immigrants from Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Korea, and Mexico. The results of the study show that the effect of Islam on leisure behavior manifests itself through the emphasis on strong family ties and on family oriented leisure among Muslims; the need to teach and supervise children and to pass traditional moral values to subsequent generations; the requirement of modesty in dress, speech and everyday behavior; as well as the restrictions on mix-gender interactions, dating, food and alcohol. The finding of this study suggest that leisure researchers need to pay more attention to the effects of religion on leisure behavior and should strive to incorporate the religious beliefs as part of the cultural heritage of minorities.

Kellengerger clarifies the general notion of humility and identifies the core contrasting states that oppose humility which will provide a basis or platform that allows all to see how humility can in different forms be a moral virtue and to address the paradox of one's being proud of one's humility. And identifying the core contrasting states of humility, along with certain religious desiderata, will allow all to see the nature that humility must have when it is a religious virtue. In pursuing these concerns, he considers whether the polar opposite of pride is humility or shame, some of the different forms of pride and shame, and the cognitive requirements of humility as a moral virtue and as a religious virtue.

Recent attempts to explain why modesty should be considered a virtue have failed. A more adequate account is that modesty involves understanding how far one's accomplishments ought to be taken as definitive of one's value. Modest people communicate this self-understanding through behaviour motivated by the desire to ensure that their accomplishments do not cause pain to others. This virtuous mode of self-awareness involves recognizing that one is both defined by social standards of success and irreducible to these assessments. Modest agents do not think themselves 'better' than others, but recognize that they rank higher on the particular social standard in question. They thus both avoid causing pain and serve as exemplars of virtuous self-responsibility.

In Iran, as in many countries worldwide, misinformation and ignorance of HIV/AIDS have encouraged a culture of secrecy and anonymity for those living with HIV. For many HIV-positive women, religious, political and economic pressures complicate their social status and access to health care. Moreover, they must contend with societal discrimination and stigmas associated with the condition. Adding nuance to contemporary studies on gender and sexuality in Iran, this report highlights the colourful narratives of a select group of HIV-positive mothers attending weekly wellness workshops in Tehran. Discussing issues of intimacy, modesty, motherhood and stigmatisation, this article explores one of Iran's expanding communities at risk of infection and the ways in which women with HIV negotiate the stigma of their condition in an Islamic Republic.

Swanton makes arguments for two basic assumptions: that a virtue ethical search for a virtue ethical criterion of rightness is an appropriate search, and that since virtue ethics in modern guise is still in its infancy, more work needs to be done in the exploration of virtue ethical criteria of the right.

One of the factors that contributes to an agent's praiseworthiness and blameworthiness — his or her moral worth — is effort. On the one hand, agents who act effortlessly seem to have high moral worth. On the other hand, agents who act effortfully seem to have high moral worth as well. I explore and explain this pair of intuitions and the contour of our views about associated cases.