Sport diplomacy between the United States and Iran

America and Iran have not had diplomatic relations for two decades. In May 1997 the election of Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, to Iran's presidency provided an opening for a cautious rapprochement. Khatami advocated people-to-people contacts between the two nations to break the ice, and the United States agreed. After critically evaluating the idea of people-to-people contacts and discussing the role of the large Iranian diaspora in America as a mediator between the peoples of the two countries, this article examines the sports diplomacy that resulted from Khatami's initiative. It concludes with a comparison with the ping pong diplomacy that heralded the thaw in US-Chinese relations.     

Employment versus empowerment: A case study of the nature of women's work in Ecuador

This research re‐evaluates the female marginalisation thesis through an examination of the changing nature of work in Latin America and of women's incorporation into paid employment. We combine labour market segementation theory, which explains the emergence of low level occupations in terms of capitalist restructuring, with feminist theory, which explains why women become concentrated in inferior positions. We operationalise this reconceptualisation through an empirical analysis of women's and men's relative occupational position across economic sectors and through time in Ecuador. A key finding is that women's and men's occupations are differentiated in terms of control over economic resources and control over the labour process and that this worsens over time.