Employment equity in Canada and South Africa: a comparative review

The South African Government has sought to redress the historical legacy of workplace discrimination by introducing the Employment Equity Act (1998), which was largely modeled on the Canadian Employment Equity Act. Although there is very little comparative information between South Africa and Canada, we fill this gap by reviewing the literature in both countries, highlighting common features of the legislation, discussing the effectiveness of legislation in both countries as well as the progress made by the designated groups covered by the legislation. This paper provides a background on the rationale for employment equity and associated human resource management policies in both Canada and South Africa. The analysis is largely based on institutional theories of organizations. Our evaluation provides overall conclusions for policy makers and organizational leaders, taking into consideration socio-historical, political, and demographic differences between the jurisdictions. Issues include top management commitment, organizational culture, Black economic empowerment, and diversity policies and practice

The paradoxes of applying ethnography at a distance: Dürer’s Rhinoceros

In 1515, Albrecht Dürer received news of an animal encased in armour: it was an Indian rhinoceros which was being transported towards Rome as a present for Pope Leo X. The description and a sketch of the animal, arrived in Dürer’s hands, he made a woodcut that Europeans came to adopt as the true depiction of the rhinoceros. Dürer would never see an actual rhinoceros in his life. Nevertheless, this legendary woodcut creature shaped the public perception of a rhinoceros for the next two centuries. Is it art’s idealisation of the natural world the answer to overcoming distance? Or are metaphors just another type of truth? Prevented by the Covid-19 circumstances from going out to the field, Dürer’s Rhinoceros has become more than a metaphor for my project. My research included the production of a documentary in-situ, which soon changed for the production of a documentary at a distance. The different narratives created by the socio-cultural context and the documentary filmmaker’s commitment to truth hang over her like a sword of Damocles. I attempted to find solutions and other ways to reproduce the same proximity at a distance resourcing to online/research. In a moment of enthusiasm, and encouraged by early investigations, I wrote: ‘To recreate the proximity that this research needs, it is necessary to devise a new methodology, incorporating a strong network of collaborators, between researchers in the field, leaders of organisations and individuals prepared to communicate at a distance in a collective and polyphonic way’. This paper will analyse the different methods of conducting an online research in times of pandemic and crisis, to determine how narratives are created. As with Dürer’s woodcut, Rhinoceros, reality is very different

Maya women contest online narratives in action: creating equality through horizontal communication

Feminist Maya women have been contesting the narrative imposed by the state, social prejudices and media-imposed perceptions in contemporary Guatemala, reclaiming their place in society. This has been documented from an indigenous perspective (Chirix, 2008; Hernández-Castillo, 2010; Tzul Tzul, 2018; Cumes, 2019). In the long thread of history the indigenous population of Guatemala has resisted colonial imposition through the use of multiple strategies of adaptation, sometimes utilising elements of the dominant culture. In this case the creation of an online/virtual place in social media to defend and fight for their rights during the Covid-19 pandemic. By studying the case of the Guatemalan National Midwives Movement from a decolonial perspective and analysing the online development of: horizontal communication theory (Beltrán, 1979), in exceptional pandemic circumstances, will allow us to uncover: how indigenous women define their identity in relation to their knowledge, world-views and philosophies in their own voices, beyond any type of discrimination social or economic. This will enable a better understanding of how their communal organisational and communication strategies differ from Western individualism. However, social media cannot be fully representative of the indigenous midwives’ culture. The process of conveying meanings by words in a language that it is not your own and in contested media, such as an online/virtual place, certainly implies a process of surrendering. As Rivera Cusicanqui (2020) argues ‘in colonialism there is a very particular function for words, they do not name, they mask.’ This paper concludes that feminist decolonisation, cannot solely be rhetoric, but needs to be put to practice in every action

Storage stability of whole and nibbed, conventional and high oleic peanuts (<i>Arachis hypogeae </i>L.)

Peanuts are increasingly being used as nibbed ingredients in cereal bars, confectionery and breakfast cereals. However, studies on their oxidative stability in this format are limited. Storage trials to determine the stability to oxidation were carried out on whole and nibbed kernels of conventional (CP) and high oleic (HOP) peanuts, with respect to temperature and modified atmosphere packaging. HOP exhibited the highest oxidative stability, with a lag phase in whole kernels of 12–15 weeks before significant oxidation occurred. HOP also showed higher levels of intrinsic antioxidants, a trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC) of 70 mMol equivalence and radical scavenging percentage (RSP) of 99.8 % at the beginning of storage trials, whereas CP showed values of 40 mMol and 81.2 %, respectively. The intrinsic antioxidants at the beginning of these storage trials were shown to affect the peroxide value (PV), where RSP and TEAC decreased, and PV increased. Therefore, in peanuts the processing format (nibbed or whole) had the highest influence on susceptibility of lipid oxidation, highest to lowest importance: processing format &gt; temperature &gt; atmospheric conditions

Exact vortex nucleation and cooperative vortex tunneling in dilute BECs

With the imminent advent of mesoscopic rotating BECs in the lowest Landau level (LLL) regime, we explore LLL vortex nucleation. An exact many-body analysis is presented in a weakly elliptical trap for up to 400 particles. Striking non-mean field features are exposed at filling factors >>1 . Eg near the critical rotation frequency pairs of energy levels approach each other with exponential accuracy. A physical interpretation is provided by requantising a mean field theory, where 1/N plays the role of Planck's constant, revealing two vortices cooperatively tunneling between classically degenerate energy minima. The tunnel splitting variation is described in terms of frequency, particle number and ellipticity.Comment: 4 pages,4 figure

Energy cost associated with vortex crossing in superconductors

Starting from the Ginzburg-Landau free energy of a type II superconductor in a magnetic field we estimate the energy associated with two vortices crossing. The calculations are performed by assuming that we are in a part of the phase diagram where the lowest Landau level approximation is valid. We consider only two vortices but with two markedly different sets of boundary conditions: on a sphere and on a plane with quasi-periodic boundary conditions. We find that the answers are very similar suggesting that the energy is localised to the crossing point. The crossing energy is found to be field and temperature dependent -- with a value at the experimentally measured melting line of $U_\times \simeq 7.5 k T_m \simeq 1.16/c_L^2$, where $c_L$ is the Lindemann melting criterion parameter. The crossing energy is then used with an extension of the Marchetti, Nelson and Cates hydrodynamic theory to suggest an explanation of the recent transport experiments of Safar {{\em et al.}\ }.Comment: 15 pages, RevTex v3.0, followed by 5 postscript figure

Low-lying excitations of a trapped rotating Bose-Einstein condensate

We investigate the low-lying excitations of a weakly-interacting, harmonically-trapped Bose-Einstein condensed gas under rotation, in the limit where the angular mometum $L$ of the system is much less than the number of the atoms $N$ in the trap. We show that in the asymptotic limit $N \to \infty$ the excitation energy, measured from the energy of the lowest state, is given by $27 N_{3}(N_{3}-1) v_0 /68$, where $N_{3}$ is the number of octupole excitations and $v_{0}$ is the unit of the interaction energy.Comment: 3 pages, RevTex, 2 ps figures, submitted to PR