Alena Thiel

The vulnerable other – distorted equity in Chinese–Ghanaian employment relations

Abstract Based on a two-sided ethnographic study in Accra, this paper analyses Chinese–Ghanaian employment relations from the perspectives of psychological contract, cross-cultural equity expectations and foreignness. Reaching beyond racially framed allegations of each other that are informed partly by politicized media discourses, structural analysis shows that mutually contradictory, culturally grounded expectations regarding their employment relationship are central to the understanding of conflict between Chinese employers and Ghanaian employees. Central to the frictions of mutual equity expectations is the feeling of existential vulnerability that – although particular for each group – is shared by both Chinese migrant employers taking high financial risks in an unfamiliar and potentially hostile environment and their local employees recruited almost exclusively from economically marginalized groups.

Market Men and Station Women: Changing Significations of Gendered Space in Accra, Ghana

ABSTRACT It is impossible to understand the gendered relation between women and public space without taking into account its other, that is, male engagements with and in space. Our joint paper contrasts the public spaces of a market and a bus station in central Accra, Ghana. While the former is historically associated with female entrepreneurship, masculinity is deeply inscribed in the activities defining the latter. However, recent developments gradually undermine these gendered divides. By focusing on interpersonal claims to entrepreneurial places in the two locations, we illustrate how the configurations and co-constructions of gender and space are exposed to on-going, often subtle shifts, which are impelled by dialectically grounded transformations of quotidian spatial practices and social relations. Expanding upon the notion of viri–/uxorilocality, we explore shifts in the gendered strategies of newcomers establishing their presence in the two spaces and the extent to which these practices may alter gendered spatial significations.

When voicelessness meets speechlessness: Struggling for equity in Chinese-Ghanaian employment relations

In this article Chinese-Ghanaian employment relations are analyzed using the concepts of foreignness, the psychological contract, equity, and cross-cultural communication. Based on a qualitative study conducted in Accra, Ghana, we discuss the labor market in general and introduce the conditions under which Chinese sojourners operate their family trade businesses in the city. After discussing the phenomenon of Ghanaian employment within Chinese trade companies from a theoretical perspective, we explain how Chinese employers’ and Ghanaian employees’ culturally based perceptions of employment relations are contradictory and prone to conflict. We then show how, under the condition of the employers’ foreignness, Ghanaian employees perceive their psychological contracts as being violated and Chinese employers regard the equity of exchange relations as distorted. We discuss how Ghanaian employees cope with this situation by means of voice, silence, retreat or destruction, while Chinese employers, who lack both sufficient language skills and effective sanctions, choose to endure perceived distortions of equity and in some cases ultimately terminate employment relations when inadequate cross-cultural communication results in a failure to mediate conflicts.

The psychological contract in Chinese-African informal labor relations

This qualitative study analyzes Chinese-Ghanaian employment in trade as an example of South-South cross-cultural labor relations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, employment practices and labor conflicts are discussed with regard to psychological contract and equity. The analysis is guided by a process model of psychological contract that has been adjusted and extended in consideration of the dimensions of foreignness and cross-cultural communication. After briefly introducing the situation in Ghana we elaborate that under conditions of foreignness, employment relations are conflict prone because of contradictory equity expectations of employers and employees. We discuss how Ghanaian employees perceiving their psychological contract as violated attempt to restore equity by means of voice, silence, retreat or destruction and often fail due to lack of mutual cultural understanding between employers and employees. We conclude that exit in contrast to expectations is a viable option for employers rather than employees, but most employment relations, though defective, are perpetuated.

Orders of trade: regulating Accra's Makola market

ABSTRACT Looking closely at everyday practices within marketplaces such as the Makola market in Ghanas capital Accra brings to the fore the very diversity of actors and institutions involved in order-implementation in this particular social space. All of these actors draw on multiple conceptions of order and creatively recombine its various elements and significations into ever-new contexts. Our joint article on the maintenance of order in Makola takes the perspective of two key, ordering actors and institutions in this market – traders associations and police forces – and analyses the manifold and mutually entangled conceptions of order on which these actors draw in their pursuit to legitimise their own and others’ actions. Police officers may not represent the state but act in the light of business interests, whereas market associations follow many more rationalities apart from their members’ economic gains. They perceive themselves as a market family, and enact particular realms of stateness; for example, when assisting with tax collection. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork, in which each researcher independently focused on particular actor groups in the market, we analyse how these constellations of actors and their particular conceptions of order play out in everyday practices and interactions.

Entangled temporalities: Ghana's national biometric identity registration project

Biometric identity registration technologies are spreading throughout the world. Developing countries in particular, have recently been seen to construct biometric population registers in partnership with international donor organizations. This article traces the temporal entanglements produced by transnational policy mobilities in the inception and implementation of Ghanas national biometric identity registration project. In 2008, Ghana famously introduced the first biometric banking system in Africa. Yet, the e-zwich payment system marked only the first step towards the current ‘craze’ for biometric identity registration in the West African country. Among the numerous biometric identity documents circulating in Ghanas national and subnational institutions, the national Ghanacard is the most interesting identity registration project in the country, both in terms of its population-wide reach and the complex constellation of institutions, actors and ideas competing within the project. With a focus on the temporalities of policymaking, the article examines the projects fundamental future orientation, the temporal context of its production with its specific possibilities of imagining and acting upon certain matters, and the rhythms and schedules of project implementation. By doing so, it draws attention to some of the ways in which competing sets of ideas shape large-scale investments in technology and infrastructure in Africa.