intra- city natural structures have an important role in developing city qualities and the promotion of its aesthetic, ecological and social values which also allow people to have their recreational activities. as tehran river-valleys have been damaged according to users’ behaviors and irregular constructions, the present paper aims to identify the typical behavioral characters of tourists in d...

As application areas rapidly grow beyond the theoretical framework of fundamental decision theory we are very often temptated to see whether or not soft systems may promise some efficient modelling of real life problems. The pioneering bust towards soft systems methodology has come from the needs of mathematical sociology. Its contemporary definition as well as its applied architecture have bee...

At the level of theory it is now widely accepted that energy consumption patterns are a complex technical and socio-cultural phenomenon and to understand this phenomenon, it must be viewed from both engineering and social science perspectives. However, the methodological approaches taken in household energy studies lag behind the theoretical advances made in the last ten or fifteen years. The q...

Social change and large-scale transformations are as important to everyday life sociology as to macro sociology approaches. South Africa has been a 'hotspot' of change with a number of such transitions occurring in a condensed time-period, in particular regarding 'race' matters. A large South African family collection, concerning the Forbes family, is used to explore how the processes of change...

This paper proposes a sociology of knowledge approach as a basis for understanding the potential of knowledge management for a complex inter-organisational domain– the UK construction industry–with a specific aim of increasing the sustainability of the processes and products of the industry. To this end, soft systems methodology is introduced as a method of conceptualising the industry’s knowle...