Besides, if you agree with Skocpol's take on social revolutions, when the circumstances are ripe for a revolution, it's pretty much inevitable. Leaders of the revolution are opportunists that express and stoke the sentiments that already exist in the people.
Having read her piece on the Iranian Revolution, speculatively, it would have required some sort of preemptive economic and social reorientation to better embed the Shah's regime in society/better incorporate a variety of classes into the regime. It's generally much harder for personalistic autocracies to do this. The other factors as I recall were an oil bust in 1977 and substantial inflation, the latter of which at least could have been prevented with shreweder investment policies.
