Search results

This paper critically evaluates potential barriers to employment opportunities for ethnic minority (EM) individuals in Scottish Local Authorities – both in terms of access to job and development opportunities. It provides a fundamental discussion of concepts around race and ethnicity, and the levels of social injustice, with an explicit focus on institutional racialisation, discrimination and segregation. The paper explores organisational approaches towards recruitment, including positive action and workforce development.

This paper adopts a subjectivist (ontology) and interpretivist (epistemology) stance, based on a small-scale, in-depth investigation. The data have been gathered through semi-structured interviews with equality diversity and inclusion (EDI) officers in four Scottish Local Authorities, utilising thematic analysis.

The finding suggests that participating local authorities have a long way to go to ensure the elimination of barriers to employment for EM people. This is largely based on concerns around limitations in the application of positive action and elimination of disadvantages in recruitment and access to career and development opportunities?

The paper aims to contribute by exploring the availability of employment opportunities for EMs through the eyes of EDI Officers in four local authorities. Their thorough understanding, over- and insight into potential equality issues from an employment perspective are invaluable, focussing on more tangible organisational issues and approaches.

This paper examines the impact of board ethnic diversity on the level of compliance with international financial reporting standards (IFRS) disclosures.

Using a unique hand-collected dataset from South Africa, we develop a comprehensive disclosure index against 570 mandatory requirements of IFRS. Further, we employ the fixed-effects model to investigate whether board ethnic diversity affects IFRS disclosures.

We document a significant positive association between ethnic minority directors and IFRS disclosure levels. Furthermore, we reveal that non-busy ethnic minority directors have a greater impact on IFRS disclosure levels than their busy counterparts. Additional analyses show that ethnic minority directors have less impact on IFRS disclosure levels when their number exceeds two. Companies with more ethnic directors on audit committees are more likely to comply with IFRS disclosure requirements and ethnic diversity increases accounting disclosures irrespective of the level of ownership concentration.

Our findings shed new light on the impact of board ethnic diversity on firms’ compliance with IFRS disclosure requirements. The results are robust to alternative econometric techniques, proxies and potential endogeneity concerns.

Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.

This chapter examines the ‘embodied turn’ in the study of traditional Chinese sports and identifies issues within this area of research. It introduces new interpretative perspectives and approaches within the framework of bodily sociology to elucidate the link between locally-informed sports practices and the formation of socialized individuals. The chapter categorises the current research into three main themes: self-giving, the creation of bodily value and the construction of national identity through sports. It then integrates these themes with the findings of embodied sociology. The chapter compiles and analyzes the existing literature on traditional Chinese sports culture from both Chinese and international scholars, offering insights into the status, rationale and challenges of bodily sociological research. By contextualising the concept of the embodied turn in traditional Chinese sports culture – through concepts such as self-givenness, self-techniques, the generation of value and the creation of collective memory – the chapter discusses the impact of bodily sociology on cultural research. The chapter advocates for further bodily sociological studies of Chinese sports culture, which could enhance the understanding of Chinese studies among Western scholars and contribute to a genuine embodied turn in this field of study. Providing one of the initial explorations of embodied studies in traditional Chinese sports, the chapter reveals a transition from broad cultural interpretations and symbolic, structuralist sociology to a phenomenological approach in sports cultural studies. It posits that the bodily sociology approach is beneficial for sports studies although current research has not yet fully realized the embodied turn.

This chapter argues that the National Basketball Association (NBA) and American mainstream sporting media produce and mediate a representation of India as underdeveloped and as an unmodern subject/nation as a way to enter the Indian basketball marketplace. The chapter emphasizes that the NBA produces the attendant discourse of the ‘white saviour’ through a multi-pronged process. The chapter shows how it draws upon the legacies of British colonialism, along with the expansion of US imperialism, to construct India in particular racialised ways as backward, unmodern, and not cosmopolitan. In this respect, Black NBA players’ modes of basketball reach India as part of the racialisation of Indian basketball. Finally, the chapter engages with the larger global circuits of race and racialisation to understand how India is then imagined within the US sporting landscape. This chapter underscores the capitalist desires of the NBA alongside the desires of South Asian Americans for an Indian basketball hero. Both desires, institutional and personal, showcase racialisation at work. The NBA uses the language and performance of Judeo-Christian modernity through NBA players in India to racialise Indians as in need of NBA mentorship and upliftment. On other hand, diasporic Indians in the US dream of an Indian NBA player as a way to unravel, destabilise, and challenge their racialisation as hypo-masculine subjects. These competing forms of racialisation provide important information on the global flows of capital, desire, and sport.

The purpose of this review paper is to investigate the consequences of tourism development and economic growth within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, focusing specifically on Lao PDR post-pandemic. The adverse effect of COVID-19 on tourism and economic sectors has been pervasive across the ASEAN region, with varying degrees of impact. Some of these difficulties are set to continue, though there are positive signs of recovery and of the resilience of the tourism industry. Utilising case material from Lao PDR in Southeast Asia – an area frequently neglected in tourism studies – the paper sheds light on the post-pandemic landscape to address existing gaps in the current literature.

A case study approach was taken in this review paper, utilising secondary data such as media reports, official reports from Tourism Laos and international governing bodies like United Nations and the World Bank to form a viewpoint discussion in the Lao PDR post-pandemic condition.

This paper reveals that contrary to a long period of recovery post-pandemic, there has been a degree of continuity from the pre-pandemic period. Considerable numbers of backpackers have returned to Vang Vieng, along with Vientiane and Luang Prabang. While the pre-pandemic emphasis on mass tourism persists, there is also an increased focus on regional and domestic markets. Laos, with its strategic location and cross-border connections, aims to take advantage of this shift.

The paper highlights a detailed exploration of the Lao tourism industry post-pandemic. It goes beyond the initial expectations in literature of a complete transformation post-pandemic, highlighting the continuity in visitor sources and traditional tourist attractions. It emphasises the Lao PDR strategic position for market reorientation, providing insight into the nation’s adaptive strategies and a nuanced perspective on the evolving landscape of Lao tourism.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.