Exploring the interplay between Buddhism and career development : a study of highly skilled women workers in Sri Lanka

This article adopts a socio cultural lens to examine the role of Buddhism in highly skilled women workers’ careers in Sri Lanka. While Buddhism enabled women’s career development by giving them strength to cope with difficult situations in work, it also seemed to restrict their agency and constrain their career advancement. Based on our findings, we argue that being perceived as a good Buddhist woman worked as a powerful form of career capital for the respondents in our sample, who used their faith to combat gender disadvantage in their work settings

Brotherhood considered – Responsibility and tensions concerning elderly support in North China

The culture of the Han-Chinese designates brotherhood as a valuable form of alliance. Codes of behaviour towards one’s brother(s) are ascribed in cultural norms. However, within the concept and practices of kinship, ambiguous borderlines of hierarchy and egalitarianism among brothers leave certain areas free for contesting individual interests. This article takes an extended case study of conflict between two brothers in their old age over their elderly support provisions to analyse how notions of brotherhood are re-shaped as Chinese peasants are confronted with serious social insecurity due to lower incomes and insufficient institutional arrangements for elderly support; how conventional concepts of hierarchy, equality, and fairness have been mobilised, interpreted in different ways to justify their own rights and rightness before the civil judgements of other villagers and the verdicts of the juridical system. This case study directs the reader’s attention to the different facets of societal transformation in the last three decades, which impact kinship arrangements, and accordingly caused immense individual anxiety