Land is a powerful asset, but it also has a social function. Its economic and social aspects are central in advancing gender equality. Legal control of land as well as legal and social recognition of women’s uses of and rights to land, can also have catalytic effects of empowerment, increasing women’s influence and status in their homes and communities. During past decades changes in the Chinese land tenure rights and practices have brought important incentives for rural developments including farmer income and living standards. However, rural women’s land rights are still not adequately implemented. Despite modernization, China is administratively and socially very hierarchical. Foucault's idea of power provides a better starting point for looking at the use of power at the grassroots level than the hierarchical conception of power. Although the Communist Party has significant hierarchical power, at the village level, there are several parties involved in the exercise of power with different motives and perceptions. Regarding to methodology, many researchers have utilized government and other official material to explain certain phenomenon. This research is mainly based on interviews because they can provide an insight that might otherwise be invisible in official documents. This research uses an intersectional approach to qualitative content analysis. It allows the exploration of numerous intersection themes simultaneously. For example, according to this research, age, marital status, location, and gender play an important role in women’s equality situation.

Team

This research focuses on FBOs (World Vision, Fida International and Free Pentecostal Church of Tanzania) and their development projects by employing the capability approach and examining how the faith base influences assessments of valued functionings as aspects of good life, capabilities, and freedoms. Research is based on fieldwork in several regions in Tanzania.

Team

This is a joint research of the University of Helsinki’s discipline of Social and Cultural Anthropology and South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council, with funding from the Academy of Finland and the National Research Foundation of South Africa for the period 2013-2016. The project investigates the kinds of social subjectivities and forms of socio-political and economic empowerment that current youth music styles enhance among South African youth. The key questions are what kinds of social, racial, gender, class, religious and citizenship identities and communities are being imagined and created through music-related practices, and what kinds of empowerment strategies and realities they entail.

Team

Ibrahim Abraham, Tuomas Järvenpää, Benita Moolman, Tuulikki Pietilä

The objective of the study is to describe the complex and implicit process in which organizational culture are produced in the everyday working life. Drawing on the work of Schein (1992), I described organizational culture perceived by employees and analyze in three levels: artifacts (language, clothes) espoused values (prioritizing your work) and basic assumption (What’s the most important). From my ethnographic study at two large Chinese multinational companies located in Northwestern Europe, I found that Chinese and non-Chinese employees do not really communicate between each other, there are a lot of misunderstanding, tension, conflict on both side. My intention is to build dialog between Chinese and Western 1) experiences 2) theoretical models of organizational culture.

Team

Professor Hannu Räty, Dr Matti Kuittinen