TY - JOUR AU - Harris, Kevan PY - 2015/08/31 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - The Breakaway Boss: Semiperipheral Innovations and the Rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad JF - Journal of World-Systems Research JA - JWSR VL - 21 IS - 2 SE - Special Issue: World-Systems Biographies DO - 10.5195/jwsr.2015.13 UR - http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/13 SP - 417-447 AB - <p><em>Within a year of becoming president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad had already confused much of the world. Explanations of his political ascent in a semi-peripheral country rely largely on the concept of charismatic authority. This is a non-explanation, however, as the charismatic historical figure who seemingly holds creative command over the social world also has to be created. Instead, I argue that Ahmadinezhad’s trajectory from an Islamist engineering student to the presidency of a post-revolutionary state highlights three mechanisms of social-political innovation that are bounded by space and time: the situated overlap of social capital, the paradox of vertical clientage, and the breakaway of the machine boss</em>. <em>These mechanisms are usually misread as timeless signifiers of national backwardness or as charismatic </em>dei ex machina. <em>By showing these mechanisms at work through biography, we can challenge scholarly and popular explanations of social change that implicitly rehash modernization theory.</em></p> ER -