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This chapter aims to understand how the role and status of Sámi women in kinship system and in reindeer herding were transformed over time in Norway and Sweden. What is the reason for considering men as reindeer herders and not women? Has it always been men who play a more important role in reindeer herding and so have higher status in Sámi society than women? This has not always been the case. Reindeer herding has instead become a dominant male occupation with the implementation of the nation-states’ reindeer herding legislation. Gender roles in Sámi communities are changing and new strategies for surviving and maintaining a Sámi identity are being formed. Many women in reindeer herding Sámi communities are now working as wage-labourers and professionals, bringing in money to the family. Their income often facilitates the continuation and transformation of subsistence practices, and power relations. This chapter proposes that the ascribed ethnic identity of Sámi women became linked to the identity of their brothers and husbands with the implementation of modern legislation, and still is, although Sweden is striving to be a gender equalitarian society.

Purpose – This chapter explores how various types of sports provided by the Sámi sport organisation in Norway (SVL-N) contribute to the construction of Sámi ethnic identity.

Design/methodology/approach – Analysis of policy documents and literature of Sámi sport, and field work into Sami sport contexts were conducted. Based on the theoretical framework of identity as a result of ethnic boundaries, the analysis focuses upon identity work within Sámi contexts, compared with identity work across Sámi and Norwegian contexts.

Findings – Both unique Sami sports, such as reindeer racing and lassoing, and ‘universal sport’, such as football and cross-country skiing, provide opportunities for the construction of ethnic identity. Identity work within Sámi contexts focused on the internal cultural elements, while identity work in universal sports focused on the differences in comparison with Norwegian sport. However, refinements were revealed.

Research limitations/implications – The main limitation of this study is lack of empirical evidence provided by the athletes in Sámi sports.

Originality/value – This chapter provides an overview of Sámi sports and various approaches to ethnic identification through sport. The emphasis is on how a theoretical approach focusing on ethnic boundaries is supplemented by an approach acknowledging the cultural material within specific ethnic contexts.

Cultural traditions should not be lost, and yet because of lifestyle changes, reorganisation of family life and the influence of globalisation, the rich heritage of a country like Finland risks being forgotten. In this chapter, the author argues for ways to redress this situation by ensuring the transmission of traditions, cultural heritage and enculturation through early childhood education.

In the long term, all organisations may be temporary. Some, however, are more temporary than others. Temporary organisations are designed not so much with an eye on enduring as on accomplishing a specific task. In this chapter, the authors explore paradoxes, understood as persistent mutually defining oppositions that occur at the intersection of ‘the temporary’ and ‘the enduring’. To do so, the authors discuss the concept of memory, which we use to explore the process of preserving and reproducing memories of people and events as a bridge between the temporalities of organising that are past and were never intended to endure, and those that are ongoing. By reconstructing one case of the European Capital of Culture initiative, the authors discuss memory as critical to temporary organisations in the sense that temporary organisations always have a memory that affords continuity: hence are enduring. The authors argue that there is endurance in the temporary and temporariness in endurance: expressing the paradoxical essence of organising.

Teaching about development contains a basic contradiction. The issues are even more stark when we consider that gender disruptions are always a part of the discontinuities in any development process. Students and text books often assume that women are being suppressed and it is a task of development workers to “free” women from “traditional” oppression.

Here the author explores some of the contradictions inevitably part of Development Anthropology. On the one hand, the development worker’s etic vision of problems to be solved by “development” controls discussion in the classroom and the transfer of resources to the field. On the other hand, ordinary villagers’ or urbanites’ emic vision of what is happening in the socio-­cultural system as it faces pressures to “develop” hold sway in field contexts, as well as in their classroom analysis. The author needs to bring the realities of field settings into the pedagogical setting.

Application and pedagogy tend to interpenetrate; there is no clear boundary. Relying on discussions of the pedagogical problems, the author explores some of the discontinuities to be found in a gendered vision of development. The author stresses the problems highlighted by the educational environment in which students frequently first encounter these issues. The ultimate goal of this study is to make clear that teaching about or engaging in development do not have sharp boundaries and cannot be accomplished within the confines of a value-free paradigm. Every decision in this area involves a meeting of emic and etic visions and the value systems that arise from them.

The geosocial divide that separates many rural regions of Alaska continues to present considerable challenges, such as those that have long plagued the Yukon-Kuskokwim region with cultural and value conflicts. Lack of empirical data and improper identification of the root causes of the ongoing socio-political, cultural and economic disparities between rural Alaska and the rest of the country contribute to the general misconceptions of the turbulent nature of life on the tundra today. In this isolated region, the state has built dozens of schools that largely employ non-Natives. Teacher certification requirements have largely alienated Alaska Natives from pursuing careers in their home villages due to cost, lack of access, lack of student support and irrelevant curriculum. Despite rigorous standards and extraordinary funding opportunities, the current model has traditionally underperformed against both state and national norms.

This research targets a project that re-conceptualizes the teacher certification pipeline for remote Alaska Native villages via the utilisation of a competency-based bilingual curriculum, mentoring and interactive learning delivered via hybrid and online formats. The Native Teacher Certification Pathway proposed will be significant both in its local impact on unemployed adults and Yupik youth, and globally as a site for innovation in the application, delivery and assessment of evidence-based student support activities and programmes. Leveraging place, identity, language and values make learning incredibly powerful, increases efficacy and creates a true impact. Universities and business programmes that are sensitive to this fact and tailor their programmes appropriately will likely see a greater return on their investment.

The focus in this chapter is on male strategies of coping with unemployment and how these strategies are gendered due to local contextual factors, physical and natural as well as social and cultural. The results of the study show, in the case of men's relations to the labour market and the factors affecting such relations, how the Swedish welfare model and gender contracts work in a rural setting. The interrelation among labour market, household and family is formed according to the local gender contract and is supposed to develop within the frames of national policies, but it is also formed according to hegemonic gender regimes.

This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it examines international influences, including supranational organizations; foreign investors and international accounting firms; domestic institutional influences, including the political system, economic system, legal system, and cultural system; and accounting infrastructure. China’s convergence is driven by desired efficiency of the corporate sector and legitimacy of participating in the global market. Influenced heavily by international forces in the context of globalization, corporate governance and accounting practices are increasingly becoming in line with internationally acceptable standards and codes. While convergence assists China in obtaining legitimacy, improving efficiency is likely to be adversely affected given that corporate governance and accounting in China operate in an environment that differs considerably from those of Anglo-American countries. An examination of the corporate governance and accounting environment in China suggests heavy government involvement within underdeveloped institutions. While the Chinese government has made impressive progress in developing the corporate governance and accounting environment for the market economy, China’s unique institutional setting is likely to affect how the imported concepts are interpreted and implemented.

Travel and tourism have had a long history in the Nordic countries, but research on tourism has a relatively short tradition in the region. Recently, academic interest in the Nordic tourism space has grown and diversified especially as a result of increasing numbers of academics and institutions involved with tourism geographies and studies and education in the region. The Nordic context has provided thematic focus areas for empirical studies that characterize tourism geographies in the region, with topics including nature-based tourism, utilization of wilderness areas, second-home and rural developments, impacts in peripheries, and tourism as a tool for regional development. In addition, there are emerging research themes outside of the traditional core topics, such as urban, events, and heritage tourism.