Katrine Sundsbo: Thank you for joining us today for the second Newcomers Presents webinar series. In this webinar series we explore various research topics with the help of our early career researchers
Katrine Sundsbo: My name is Kat, I'm the scholarly communications and research support manager. My colleague Hannah Pyman and myself will be managing the webinar today. So if you have any problems or questions, please just send us chat a message. Just a pre warning, I have a
Katrine Sundsbo: very playful puppy with me today and I can't ask her to be quiet. So I'm hoping she's not going to interrupt us. I do apologize if she does.
Katrine Sundsbo: We encourage you to ask questions via the Q&A function here on Zoom whilst the panelists are presenting, or at the end of the presentations. We'll be asking these questions to our speakers at the end of the webinar. And with us today we have Kathryn Chard, Priyasha Khurana,
Katrine Sundsbo: Olivia if she is joining us later on, and Oluwatosin Adebola Akande. All have very interesting and different topics they will be talking about.
Katrine Sundsbo: And just let you know that the internet connection for some speakers isn't great today, so we will try to do our best to manage this.
Katrine Sundsbo: But if anything is unclear, feel free to ask for clarification in the chat or the Q&A.
Katrine Sundsbo: So our first speaker is Kathryn Chard. She's a PhD student at the School of health and social care and she will talk about the impact of the 2014 care act on the social experience of being a carer. So whenever you're ready Kathryn.
Kathryn Chard: Sorry I forgot to share my screen!
Kathryn Chard: In my excitement!
Kathryn Chard: Okay. Can you see that?
Hannah Pyman: Yes we can see.
Kathryn Chard: Right. Lovely thanks.
Kathryn Chard: So I'm Kathryn Chard, I'm a third year PhD
Kathryn Chard: Student in the school of health and social care, and I'm based in the centre of social work and social justice, which is in the Southend campus.
Kathryn Chard: So I am in the third year of my PhD, and I'm assessing the effectiveness of a piece of adult social care law called the Care Act in improving the lives of people with caring responsibilities.
Kathryn Chard: So what I want to do with my presentation is to share some of the key findings that I have from the mixed methods study that I carried out.
Kathryn Chard: So I thought it might be helpful just to tell you a little bit of background and context to study and why it's worth assessing the effectiveness of the care act in improving the lives of carers.
Kathryn Chard: My background is in social work and we, for many years, worked with people have had caring responsibilities. When we use the term carer, when referring to having people to look after,
Kathryn Chard: usually it's relatives or friends who can't manage without the help of another person because of illness or disability.
Kathryn Chard: So the law for social workers has always supported cares, but in a way that was kind of described very loosely because it's never been a duty in law to provide practical support to carers.
Kathryn Chard: So carers, usually husbands, wives, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, that look after others who can't manage without their help.
Kathryn Chard: So the Care Act came in in 2014 and it really transformed the way that people with responsibilities seek help and support through adult social care.
Kathryn Chard: And for the very first time it gave people who are carers the right to public money in the form of a personal budget which it never had that right before in law.
Kathryn Chard: So really what I wanted to do was to test the theory that the Care Act claims that personal budgets really do improve the carer's well being.
Kathryn Chard: And the way in which I wanted to go about testing that theory really was not only by looking at the actual evidence based around impact and different assumptions made,
Kathryn Chard: but I also wanted to understand from carers themselves what differences they felt the personal budget made to their lives.
Kathryn Chard: And it's partly based on my own practice because I knew from my own experience as a social worker many parents that I came into contact with
Kathryn Chard: often found that it will be difficult to manage their own lives, to have a career, to have employment, to have a relationship, you know, even to have good health and well being, as a result of care that can have such huge implications and costs to health and well being.
Kathryn Chard: That was part of the reason for wanting to carry out a mixed methods design, to think about, not just the national evidence base of impact, but also the sort of the personal stories behind that.
Kathryn Chard: So I mentioned that the Care Act being described is one of the most, sort of, transformational changes of adult social care law since the
Kathryn Chard: creation of the welfare state, and that was Norman Lamb who with, when we had the coalition government announced that
Kathryn Chard: the Care Act was really going to transform the way in which people received social care services, and particularly people with caring responsibilities, they wanted to see the change to make sure that carers are being
Kathryn Chard: given parity of esteem, which means that they wanted carers to have the same access to an assessment, and the same access to support through personal budgets that adults with
Kathryn Chard: disabilities do. A key function of personal budget was really to give carers a greater degree of care, control and choice
Kathryn Chard: over how their needs are defined and met. When we think about choice and control we think about that in relation to the guidance in terms of carers being able to shop around
Kathryn Chard: by having a pot of money that the local authority gives them following an assessment, that they can choose to spend in ways to support their well being and their ability to balance their life with caring.
Kathryn Chard: That's very much how the Care Act frames caring, as a personal budget that will help you to be able to have your own life, as well as looking after someone else.
Kathryn Chard: When thinking about the aims and objectives of the Act I want to think about it in three different ways. The first way was to think about,
Kathryn Chard: to really explore and assess the intention behind the policy solution. So I used the first phase of my study an approach to policy analysis and called "what's the problem represented to be"
Kathryn Chard: which uses discourse analysis, recording and specific analysis, to really question
Kathryn Chard: how the problem of carers is represented in policy, and then a series of questions that ask you to discursively analyze the intentions behind the way in which carers are problematised.
Kathryn Chard: And then the second phase was to think about how the policy intentions were realised in practice across the UK, but particularly in England,
Kathryn Chard: because the Care Act is a piece of law that just relates to to English social work practice, there is no legal practice for Scotland and for Wales. So I really wanted to find national data sets that would show me some evidence of personal budgets and their impacts upon well being.
Kathryn Chard: The first phase was to really understand the effects of those policies potentially through exploring insights from carers themselves about the difference they felt the personal budget made to their well being. So ability to
Kathryn Chard: access the labour market, their ability to balance working as a carer, their ability to look after children, for example, if they're caring for other adults.
Kathryn Chard: so the phase one findings, the policy intentions behind the Care Act were really, sort of, threefold. The practical policy intentions were to think about getting carers equal access to assessment and support.
Kathryn Chard: The second was about sort of choice and control over their lives, being able to shop around, but also about having participation and inclusion. So the Care Act talks a lot about carers shouldn't be discriminated against from having the life of their own because they have a caring responsibility.
Kathryn Chard: So when you apply the model of policy analysis, one of the things that you find is
Kathryn Chard: the way in which caring is viewed as a social policy problem. It's viewed very much as a problem of the individual. So when you explore the guidance in detail you see that
Kathryn Chard: the problem of caring is very much viewed as a lack of will on behalf of the individual carer. And you can see that in the way in which personal budgets are
Kathryn Chard: evidence as a means to promote well being. So for example, in the guidance, it talks about personal budgets as a means of improving the care of skill and knowledge to be a better carer.
Kathryn Chard: Or ways carers can manage the stress and the anxiety around caring. So examples of stress management, relaxation, pampering, gym membership. So it tends to feature caring as
Kathryn Chard: if it's just a responsibilisation of care, it gives carriers responsibility for primary provision of care.
Kathryn Chard: And some of the assumptions of them underpin the way in which carers are represented. They very much find that people identify with the level of carer when in actual fact
Kathryn Chard: often, people don't recognize that they're a carer, they see themselves as a husband or a wife or a son or a daughter. And also that caring is seen very much as a homogenised population though when we know from the evidence base it's a very hetereogenic population.
Kathryn Chard: And also the assumption that direct payments will improve your well being and the way in which the care resides.
Kathryn Chard: So the secondary analysis of national data sets ,the quantitative elements of my study, explores some performance and some survey data.
Kathryn Chard: And what I found through the analysis of the national data was really actually a decline in the number of parents who are being assessed and supported by English county adult social care responsibility.
Kathryn Chard: And actually, when we think, there were 5.4 million carers in England alone and between 2014 and 2019, you can see that actually very small percentages of carers are actually gaining access to carer assessments and support in the first place.
Kathryn Chard: And I looked at choice and control emulation dissatisfaction scale across England,
Kathryn Chard: and satisfaction scales range from things like how satisfied were you with your carers assessment, to things like how involved did you feel and discussions about the care as opposed to the looking after.
Kathryn Chard: And again, what I noticed was the broader decline in all satisfaction scales in terms of involvement and satisfactions with their interactions with social services.
Kathryn Chard: And then a secondary analysis of
Kathryn Chard: the survey of adult carers in England, I carried out a regression analysis using logistical regression. And one of the things I found was
Kathryn Chard: The combination between personal but it's in welding. But this, you have a personal birthday did actually improves your welding school by 39%
Kathryn Chard: but because well being scores, higher well being scores indicate poorer well being, it actually shows the relationship that actual personal budgets don't improve a carer's subjective sense of well being.
Kathryn Chard: The third phase of my findings were my 17 interviews with carers, and really the themes that came out of that in terms of
Kathryn Chard: personal budgets promoting well being very much were that actually
Kathryn Chard: it was not the personal budget itself that actually encouraged a carer, or enabled a carer to have a life of their own, it was actually more about the relationship they had with the person that they cared for.
Kathryn Chard: And the relationship they had with professional paid carers that came into their lives.
Kathryn Chard: And actually, for many carers, because the transactional way in which personal budgets were delivered to carers in my sample,
Kathryn Chard: many will not give them a choice about how they can spend the money. They are told that they have to spend it on something called replacement care that could replace them.
Kathryn Chard: So one of the things I found is that actually the way in which the Care Act sort of defines carers, and the way in which personal budgets are positioned as a solution to that,
Kathryn Chard: hasn't been borne out by the national evidence base, and also hasn't been borne out by qualitative interviews that actually the carers' perception of well being and how they define that is very different to the way in which the Care Act defines well being.
Kathryn Chard: And that's the end of my presentation.
Katrine Sundsbo: Thank you very much Kathryn. That was a very interesting talk. Thank you for sharing your findings. Just a reminder that if you have any questions, feel free to add them to the chat or the Q&A and we will deal the questions at the end.
Katrine Sundsbo: Our next speaker is Priyasha Khurana, she's an undergraduate studying psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
Katrine Sundsbo: Priyasha has worked on EEG and eye tracking at the University of Essex as a research assistant in the Psychology Department,
Katrine Sundsbo: and has also worked as an assistant clinical psychologist in Southend University hospital, amongst other things. This year. She's been mainly working with Dr. Megan Klabunde, which I'm hope I'm pronouncing correctly,
Katrine Sundsbo: on her fNIRS hyperscanning studies which she will be talking about today in her presentation two person neuroscience. So whenever you're ready Priyasha just share your screen.
priyasha khurana: Okay. So good afternoon everyone, today I will be talking about functional near infrared spectroscopy or fNIRS, is that is how it's abbreviated, and how it can be used to measure the brain activity of multiple brains simultaneously.
priyasha khurana: So humans are inherently social and interpersonal interactions are a vital part of our everyday life. It involves exchange of both verbal, it involves exchange of information, feelings, thoughts, emotions by both verbal and nonverbal cues between two or more people simultaneously.
priyasha khurana: Especially in face to face interaction nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions, body language, hand gestures and all facial movements, play, play a very key role in judging another person's intentions, especially.
priyasha khurana: And in spite of their significance, it's really difficult to analyze the brain activity during a live social interaction.
priyasha khurana: The technique of measuring the brain activity in multiple brains simultaneously is known as hyper scanning, and it allows us to investigate the real time dynamics between two or more interacting brains.
priyasha khurana: And understanding, as I said, the understanding these fine grained neural processes during a
priyasha khurana: live social interaction, it challenges the conventional imaging techniques. So such as an MRI scanner where you are alone inside of a big magnet,
priyasha khurana: you can't, it doesn't resonate with a live verbal interaction and we can't perform an experiment which is ecologically valid inside a scanner. And also if you move your head, if there are some head movements, the signal gets interrupted a lot.
priyasha khurana: Most of these issues are largely addressed by using functional NIRS, which stands for function near-infrared spectroscopy. It is a non invasive portable neural imaging device. We use this machine by ourselves in the Psychology Department.
priyasha khurana: It is based on infrared spectroscopy, which was originally designed for clinically monitoring tissue oxygenation level.
priyasha khurana: So, for example, the pulse oximeter at the doctor's clinic it detects the activity from your finger. And here we have a range of those optobes that detects the activity from the brain.
priyasha khurana: It uses the optical properties of the brain tissue when it is exposed to infrared light that is 700 to 900 nanometers.
priyasha khurana: It measures the changes in the cortical deoxygenated and oxygenated hemoglobin concentrations.
priyasha khurana: The signal that emerges from the functional NIRS is the BOLD response, is known as the BOLD response. It stands for blood oxygen level dependent signal.
priyasha khurana: It is essentially the ratio of oxygenated and the oxygenated hemoglobin. So how this works is that the ionic fluxes that occurred during a neural activity causes changes in the magnetic and electric properties of that neuron.
priyasha khurana: And increasing the neural activity results in increased glucose and oxygen consumption from the local capillary bed.
priyasha khurana: This results in a reduction in the local glucose and oxygen level and it stimulates the brain to increase the artery to have more blood supply and more cerebral blood flow.
priyasha khurana: The process is known as neuro vascular coupling, and this forms the basis of our BOLD response. The regional BOLD response
priyasha khurana: that comes from a brief peripheral stimulus is known as hemodynamic response function.
priyasha khurana: The graph demonstrates an initial dip due to the replenishment of the metabolic resources. Then we have the peak where the cerebral blood flow increases.
priyasha khurana: And then we have a post stimulus under shoot, and we have a five, four to five second lag after the stimulus is projected and we see the peak in the response.
priyasha khurana: Multiple stimulus projected together, add together in an approximate linear manner, and here we have each individual BOLD responses in response to the stimulus. But again, there should be a four to five second lag in between the stimulus.
priyasha khurana: So, the function NIRS works on two basic principles, the tissue is relatively transparent to near infrared light.
priyasha khurana: So when interacting with a medium light can either transmit through that brain medium or reflect off or scatter into the medium or get absorbed by the medium.
priyasha khurana: And there are compounds in the brain tissue which absorbs the light differentially. Specifically the oxy and the oxy hemoglobin have different absorption spectrums, which is essentially how strongly a compound absorbs the infrared light at a particular wavelength.
priyasha khurana: In the graph, in blue, is known as the optical window which is between 700 to 900 nanometers, and we can see that the oxy hemoglobin in green and the oxy hemoglobin in red have different absorption coefficients and this forms the basic of functional NIRS.
priyasha khurana: The NIRS light, the near infrared light enters the brain in a banana shaped part. The emitter emits the light which is then detected by the detector. We measured the intensity of light that returns back to the surface and infer the concentrations of oxy and the oxy hemoglobin
priyasha khurana: and in for the brain activity. Here we have a pair sources and detectors, and here we have sort of an array of sources and detectors measuring the activity from the entire cerebral.
priyasha khurana: So a typical NIRS neuroscientific experiment follows these five stages of
priyasha khurana: the study. There is a study design where we sort of decide the protocol of the experiment. What is the stimulus? What is the task?
priyasha khurana: For how long are we will be collecting the BOLD response, and things like that. Then we have the data acquisition phase where participants come to the lab, we put on the
priyasha khurana: fNIRS equipment, we we tell them about the study, we tell that it's non invasive, nothing is penetrating their brain or anything. It's a completely safe neuroimaging machine and we explain the study.
priyasha khurana: There are various sources that can cause disruption in the signal. So if there is too much light in the room, then it can
priyasha khurana: interfere with the infrared light. So we take care of all those parameters by collecting the data. Then we have the data pre processing phase where the
priyasha khurana: initial raw intensity data that is the photon comes really from the brain we convert it, using the software and lots of codes, we convert it into a file that can be then
priyasha khurana: used to analyze and infer statistical results. During pre processing, we also remove random noise from the data and
priyasha khurana: if there is any motion add effects, so for example, it might have been they've moved a lot, there might be a lot of spikes in the data. So we clean the data during the pre processing phase.
priyasha khurana: Then during the analysis phase there is lots of maps and statistical inferences and then finally we have the results in a very pretty brain image form.
priyasha khurana: So I will be discussing certain studies that have been conducted using function NIRS hyper scanning.
priyasha khurana: In the area of neuroeconomy, the task was to play an adaptive version of ultimatum game. So here essentially one participant is the proposer, another is the responder.
priyasha khurana: The proposer has to make a deal to the responder and the responder has to either accept it or reject it. There were two conditions, either they were face to face, or the face was blocked by a huge board in between. And they were communicating through the computer.
priyasha khurana: And the results showed that there was more brain synchrony during the face to face interaction in the right temporoparietal junction. That is the channel 14 whereas in Face-block condition there was no synchrony. Synchrony is depicted by the warmer colour and this
priyasha khurana: palette shows the significance of the synchrony.
priyasha khurana: Another study done in the research area of shared intentionality the participants were instructed to complete a puzzle together and
priyasha khurana: whilst this they were completing a parcel, apart from each other, the same puzzle,
priyasha khurana: and again the results showed more interpersonal neural coordination in the prefrontal cortex, while they were completing the puzzle together and we can see the graph
priyasha khurana: for the signal follows a general similar trend during the together condition. While during the apart condition we have more gaps in the data showing that it was not significantly synchronized. The red line is for the subject A and blue is for subject B.
priyasha khurana: That's all I have
priyasha khurana: in the results. Yeah.
Katrine Sundsbo: Thank you so much.
Katrine Sundsbo: That was a really fascinating presentation. Again, if you have any questions for Priyasha please remember to add them to the Q&A or to the chat. I can stop sharing for you. There you go.
Katrine Sundsbo: Right, our third speaker is Olivia.
Katrine Sundsbo: Arigho-Stiles. She's a second year
Katrine Sundsbo: PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her CHASE-AHRC supported project examines the history of ecological thought within highland indigenous movements in 20th century Bolivia. So whenever you're ready to start Olivia.
olivia arigho-stiles: Thank you. Okay, I'll just
share the screen.
olivia arigho-stiles: How much time do I have? Sorry.
olivia arigho-stiles: Can you hear me?
Katrine Sundsbo: Yes, yes.
olivia arigho-stiles: How much time do I have?
Katrine Sundsbo: About eight minutes.
OK.
olivia arigho-stiles: So my project looks at, this is one chapter out of a project that covers histories of ecological thoughts in Highland indigenous movements in Bolivia. This chapter goes back to the earlier time period that I cover, so about really about 1922 1950.
olivia arigho-stiles: And it kind of sets the scene for the ideas I develop in the later years that my project was. So theories linking the natural world and racial characteristics had circulated in Europe and the Americas from the enlightenment.
olivia arigho-stiles: In his 1748 work spirit of laws French philosopher Montasquieu developed a hypothesis that climate was the determining factor in political, social life.
olivia arigho-stiles: Later in the 19th and 20th centuries, eugenesis movement spread across the Atlantic, and the ideas of French biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck garnered immense attraction with Latin American scientific communities.
olivia arigho-stiles: So Lamarck pioneered a theory of heredity, which emphasized the role of environmental factors on genetic inheritance.
olivia arigho-stiles: But at the same time the doctrine of environmental determinism. The belief that physical environment dictates societal development became increasingly popular in the Americas.
olivia arigho-stiles: .
olivia arigho-stiles: So environments determinism would have a decisive impact in the nation building projects undertaken by Bolivian elites in the pre revolutionary years, so that is before 1952.
olivia arigho-stiles: In this chapter that I'm presenting a summary of today, I focus on the first half of the 20th century, when the natural world became the locus of analysis for reformist politicians and intellectuals in Bolivia.
olivia arigho-stiles: I ajoin a register of political and cultural writings from Bolivian intellectuals, between 1920 and 1959, and I explore how conceptualizations of geography overlapped with understandings of race in 20th century Bolivia.
olivia arigho-stiles: So I attempt to address the question as to why geography and specifically the Andean Highlands became so important to elite understandings of race in the early 20th century in Bolivia.
olivia arigho-stiles: So race and nation are concepts which are frequently been employed interchangeably in Latin America.
olivia arigho-stiles: In regards to Bolivia, the modern state of Bolivia is arranged into three ecological zones across nine departments. So you've got the mountainous Highlands, the temperate valleys, and the tropical lowlands.
olivia arigho-stiles: But it was the Andean Highlands, which became central to racialized imaginaries of the nation in the 20th century.
olivia arigho-stiles: Expressions in politics and literature emerged at the same time that land and its ownership was becoming an increasingly potent issue in Bolivia.
olivia arigho-stiles: Elites imagined Andean space as vast, timeless, and baron, an impediment to a modern productive nation.
olivia arigho-stiles: But at the same time indigenous rebellions and state massacres across the Altiplano, that's the highlands, in the early 20th century showed how the rural world was also a space of violent confrontation, and ethnic struggle.
olivia arigho-stiles: By the end of the 1940s, so towards the end of the period, I look at here,
olivia arigho-stiles: demands from peasants and indigenous communities for land reform were building.
olivia arigho-stiles: .
olivia arigho-stiles: All right.
olivia arigho-stiles: Right. So in terms of the literature that I draw on as part of this chapter, the concepts of race and space have increased,
olivia arigho-stiles: have attracted increased attention in the Andean scholarship in recent decades, but largely in the Peruvian rather than the Bolivian case.
olivia arigho-stiles: In an influential paper, Peruvian historian Cecilia Mendez attempts to account for why a clear cut division had emerged in the 20th century in Peru between coast and sierra,
olivia arigho-stiles: the mountains. The former imagined as belonging to white mestizos, to latter to Indians.
olivia arigho-stiles: He argues that the connection between race and geography in Peru, which sees Indian as equivalent to the pejorative term Serrano, a person from the Highlands, can be traced back to the 19th century, rather than to the colonial period, as has been argued in existing scholarship.
olivia arigho-stiles: .
olivia arigho-stiles: In Bolivian historiography
olivia arigho-stiles: Brooke Larson identifies the early years of the 20th century as a pivotal moment in the creation of a new political culture, as elites distance themselves from European racial theories, in their attempts to visualize a modern liberal state.
olivia arigho-stiles: Larson suggests that elites repudiated a racial policy in the social Darwinian tradition, which dictated that Indians must either disappear, or assimilate into white mestizo population.
olivia arigho-stiles: Instead, for intellectuals, the Indian was in fact a necessary fixture of the rural landscape, because in the absence of large scale immigration, production depended on a mass of Indian labour in rural areas and in mines.
olivia arigho-stiles: I'm just conscious of time, so I'll move ahead.
olivia arigho-stiles: .
olivia arigho-stiles: Right, so the rise of La Paz in the highlands as the hegemonic sight of economic power sparked new interest in Bolivian elites in conceptualizing the Andean space.
olivia arigho-stiles: It was in this context that geographic societies were established in Sucre in 1886, and in La Paz in 1889. So these societies devoted themselves to the dissemination and discussion of scientific ideas.
olivia arigho-stiles: So I'm gonna focus in this talk primarily actually probably just on Jaime Mendoza.
olivia arigho-stiles: So.
olivia arigho-stiles: Jaime Mendoza and the other thinkers that I draw on conformed to a [unknown] tendency that emerged Bolivia in the early 20th century, which Bolivian intellectual Guillermo Francovich later described as "mysticism of the earth".
olivia arigho-stiles: The texts penned by these thinkers like Jaime Mendoza arose in the context of elite debates around the Indian problem, or in other words the role that indigenous people should play in the modern nation state.
olivia arigho-stiles: Jaime Mendoza was a Sucre born politician and medical doctor. He practiced with impoverished people's living on the Altiplano.
olivia arigho-stiles: His writings epitomise the [unknown] tendency in Bolivian intellectual history, that is to say the idea that geography is central to explaining social reality.
olivia arigho-stiles: For Mendoza, all Bolivian history could be traced to its geographic environment.
olivia arigho-stiles: The environment was behind everything.
olivia arigho-stiles: It was behind all those motives that seem to explain human actions.
olivia arigho-stiles: In examining the [unknown] influences on nationality, Mendoza repudiated the overt racism of contemporaries such as L. T. [unknown] who I don't talk about here.
olivia arigho-stiles: So Mendoza's work El factor geográfico en la nacionalidad boliviana reflects on themes relating to the Andean poliera, Bolivia's different eco regions and Andean geology.
olivia arigho-stiles: His works can be seen as an attempt to shake off the fetters of internalized Euro-centrism, and understand Bolivian reality on its own terms.
olivia arigho-stiles: Erm,
olivia arigho-stiles: I'll skip ahead I think.
olivia arigho-stiles: So where Mendoza focuses on the transformative power of the Andean landscape,
olivia arigho-stiles: the overlap between anti miscegenation discourse
olivia arigho-stiles: and environmental determinism
olivia arigho-stiles: is evident in Daneil Pérez Velasco's La Mentalidad en Bolivia, which was first published in 1928.
olivia arigho-stiles: In his time Pérez Velasco was a relatively well known literato, but he has garnered less attention and less scholarship than his contemporaries [unknown] and [unknown] who I explore elsewhere in this chapter.
olivia arigho-stiles: Velasco argues that the natural world has shaped the psychology of Indians who live in closer proximity to the natural world than urban Creoles.
olivia arigho-stiles: "The American race has been, in principle, one which has taken different characteristics according to natural factors: climate, topography diet, etc. where it has lived." like Mendoza he believes the geography of Bolivia impedes national unity.
olivia arigho-stiles: Erm,
olivia arigho-stiles: how much time have I got left?
Katrine Sundsbo: I think if you can wrap it up now because we have one other speaker.
olivia arigho-stiles: Ok, in which case I'll just skip on ahead. Basically a reading of these documents that I haven't really
olivia arigho-stiles: explained shows that a multi faceted discourse connecting the Indian with the natural world and vice versa operated in the first half of the 20th century.
olivia arigho-stiles: The writers that I examine here all believe that Indians absorb the qualities of their mountainous environment, but some such Mendoza and Cabrera Valencia, who I would explore later, interpreted this more positively than others.
olivia arigho-stiles: Okay. And I'll leave it there.
Thanks.
Katrine Sundsbo: Great, thank you Olivia.
Katrine Sundsbo: Remember, if you have any questions for Olivia add them to the Q&A, or you can also post them in the chat.
Katrine Sundsbo: So our last speaker for today is Oluwatosin Adebola-Akande, a PhD student in the Essex business school with a strong background in economics, management, strategy and business administration.
Katrine Sundsbo: She's also the recipient for the Exeter leaders award. Her talk today will be on the role of managerial regulatory ties in legitimacy building. So, over to you whenever you're ready.
tee ak: I'm wondering if you can see my screen and my slides now?
Katrine Sundsbo: Yes, we can.
tee ak: Oh, very well then. Okay. Very well, then.
tee ak: Hello everyone.
tee ak: So my, my name is Adebola-Akande Oluwatosin. My research is on the role of managerial regulatory ties and legitimacy building.
tee ak: And the structure of the presentation today is going to be that I'm going to begin by giving you sort of like an insight into what the research problem is,
tee ak: after which I'm going to go into the theoretical underpinnings of my work.
tee ak: After which I will discuss the methodology and here I would speak on some of the data collection techniques that are used, and the data analytics as well.
tee ak: Thereafter I will discuss my findings and if I have a bit of time then I'll discuss perhaps the research impact and some of the limitations of my work.
tee ak: Perhaps here I should give you a disclaimer that this is my attempt at combining research of three years three papers into just a very brief overview.
tee ak: What do we know? Increasingly, we know that firms actually do develop a portfolio of ties,
tee ak: of strategies you know that a shape a very competitive space, right. We know that firms actually do build conditions that affect policy issues. This will refer to
tee ak: in the literature as constituency building strategies. We also know that sometimes they do need funds for politicians or political parties and this is called the financial incentive strategy.
tee ak: We also know about information strategy which which basically involves utilizing information to lobby politicians or key decision makers.
tee ak: And finally there's also the relational strategy, which involves developing relationships with key decision makers. Right. And these are very formal and legal ways of influencing public policy in many countries. It was first, erm,
tee ak: and all these strategies I refer to as corporate political strategies, was first proposed by Hillman et al. 1999,
tee ak: further developed by Baneerjee, 2013.
tee ak: It's been adapted by a host of other scholars including Baneerjee and Venaik, 2017.
tee ak: At this point you might then begin to wonder, of course, why do firms actively engaged in this corporate political strategies. Well, the answer is very simple, the political environment is very important and this,
tee ak: we can sort of draw understanding from the social capital theory which suggests that networking relationships have a significant positive impact not just on individuals that engage in the firm, but, of course, also on the firms.
tee ak: And firms engaging corporate political strategies will have access to scarce resources and as
tee ak: we all know that government remained very critical stakeholders in controlling stitch resources and opportunities
tee ak: especially in emerging economies and institutionally challenging contexts, which is the context of my research.
tee ak: And also social capital is also very, very important in emerging economies, because we understand that these regions have relationship based institutional structures
tee ak: owning to a collectivist cultures and hence informal and personal ties to key decision makers are major ways of influencing government policy.
tee ak: Now the interesting bit is there is a bit of a problem here because we do know that despite all of these proposed advantages that come with corporate political
tee ak: having some sort of corporate political strategy, we find that there is an increasing acknowledgement of the contingent value of corporate political strategies.
tee ak: So that it's not the case that it's always delivers the desired intended outcome. In fact, in many cases, some firms have suffered
tee ak: substantial financial losses or sometimes even reputational damages when it's almost like there's amore deep play because it's almost like a thin line between the ethical side of it
tee ak: and the corruption and bribery, which is often referred to as the darkside of corporate political
tee ak: strategies. Now, in order to address this contingent value of corporate political strategies, most scholars have adopted the method of saying, okay, perhaps
tee ak: which regions are best strategies, or maybe when should firms actually decide to engage in corporate political strategies. How long, or maybe how best?
tee ak: And other researchers have said why don't you move a bit from corporate political strategies and speak on corporate social responsibility, or is there complimentary between the two.
tee ak: My rationale is this. Perhaps we focus too long on political environment alone. How about bring the regulators into the mix. We know that legislators and NET policies, however, the regulatory agencies
tee ak: operate on the legislative oversight to interpret, to implement, and to enforce strategies through the design of administrative regulations which cannot be overemphasized. So how about we bring the regular
tee ak: regulatory environment into this cost and perhaps even into the relationship between political environment, the regulatory agencies and their performance all sort of an intended outcome.
tee ak: And that's the whole idea behind this. And then this is my conceptual framework and then these are my processes, which I wouldn't go into too much detail on because of time. But again, the proposition was this.
tee ak: The intended outcome I wanted to study was legitimacy for very obvious reasons. Multinationals around the world are increasingly facing
tee ak: non market trends and uncertainty. In many countries, especially in emerging economies. Right. And so the liability of foreignness increases the need for legitimacy for these firms and
tee ak: offer legitimacy seeking activities, one of which is corporate political activities in order to manage their trends. And so my question was essentially around which of the
tee ak: ,
tee ak: So basically my question was around which of the legitimacy...
tee ak: Which of the corporate political strategies would actually deliver the most value for legitimacy building.
tee ak: And the next question was, perhaps, does the perceived regulator's influence have an impact on how firms make their decision in terms of who to target the strategies, to the regulators or to government,
tee ak: after which I said how do we then understand the outcome in terms of legitimacy building when firms actually do target regulators, as opposed to
tee ak: the government or vice versa. Right.
tee ak: Now for my methodology. I needed to come up with an interest in research context and I see interesting because
tee ak: we know that existing research focuses on generally generalized findings from China, Malaysia, Indonesia to mean all that developing economies, or even African countries for whilst
tee ak: African countries actually do share similar characteristics, such as weak regulatory environments with these emerging economies, we do find that African countries do have unique institutional
tee ak: and social frameworks that differentiate them. Right and the African continent has to remain relatively unexplored and perhaps
tee ak: an interesting phenomena that has yet to be explained by existing theories. So this presents an opportunity for researchers like myself to foray into some sort of empirical blind spot
tee ak: that can possibly alter theory or our understanding of how this political environment works.
tee ak: And so Nigeria is a very interesting country, it's the third largest for FDI fluids in Africa with fluids estimated from over 99.6 billion in 2018 and it's increased dramatically since then and this represents 25.1% of the country's GDP.
tee ak: Again,
tee ak: with the Nigerian context, again, the Nigerian context, it's a situation where the parts of the government are also separated and checks and balances are largely ineffective in this region. So hence, there's a need for
tee ak: multinationals to have some sort of strategy or ties in dealing with government
tee ak: if they are supposed to actually get in. Right. So what I did again, was collected data from 260 multinational subsidiaries
tee ak: operating Nigeria from all over the world from US, China, there was no limitation in terms of that, and the from the key decision makers and the actual managers, the people in senior positions, and then I did the quantitative analysis.
tee ak: Quantitative research was with surveys, and then the major limitation with my research was that
tee ak: I struggled with the poor databases. So in fact, sometimes when I had the address of the multinational data physically verify all the locations and beyond that also I couldn't issue an online survey I had to physically go to all of the
tee ak: locations and and also physically copy and sometimes I had to come back again to collect
tee ak: the questionnaire that I'd issued. The findings are very interesting, but because of time, I will just focus on two.
tee ak: The first important finding was that the financial incentive strategy was the most important strategy for building legitimacy in regions like this, and perhaps unsurprising as well,
tee ak: I found that the information incentive strategy had no effect on legitimacy building.
tee ak: Also another phenomenon that I'm most excited about is the fact that one of the pre antecedents of corporate political strategy is that firms will develop,
tee ak: Well, from pre existent research, was that firms will develop corporate political strategies if institutional characteristics necessitate this right.
tee ak: But I found that this is not always true, actually it's the level of institutional development of the industry to which the client of a firm belongs that actually determines
tee ak: the, actually determines what matters the most for social capital. So not the general institutional development of the country.
tee ak: Because I found that the highly regulated industries which are institutionally stronger have clearly stipulated rules and procedures and relatively well-governed
tee ak: so multinationals prefer to intensify ties or sort of have some
tee ak: sort of stick to have some sort of break regulated legitimacy in regions like this, as opposed to developing any form of ties with the government, especially in sectors such as
tee ak: telecommunications. And this is important because it helps us to distill from a macro view of institutional development to a more industry view
tee ak: as well.
tee ak: Also, and this also fuels, of course, the lack of insight into the instance of how firms actually need to make their decisions.
tee ak: And
tee ak: these are the contributions that I wouldn't go into because of time and perhaps I should say that you might want to ask the question, that why is this important. First of all it's important for
tee ak: multinationals because even though economic theories that have argued that profit maximization is the
tee ak: major aim when they're going into locations like this, we argue that the actual or perceived regulated normative
tee ak: and cognitive legitimacy remains critical in these operations for survival and growth in this region.
tee ak: And deploy evocative and context fitting strategies within the weak institutional environment. It's very important to know that to achieve the aims. And also this is very important on the country level because
tee ak: perhaps this gives an insight into the fact that financial incentives still remains one of the major ways by which firms feel that we can achieve legitimacy.
tee ak: And the Nigerian government in particular has been very vocal
tee ak: The new government has been very vocal about anti-corruption and it's been doing brilliantly well over the last four years. Perhaps they should look into the need to limit campaign financing to call out vote buying and corruption,
tee ak: and actually incentivise more information strategies which actually help to strengthen the weak agencies, because as we did note
tee ak: that the firms, multinational firms, did not typically deploy, will not typically deploy corporate political strategies to exploit institutional weaknesses.
tee ak: In some cases if regulatory agencies, that's the regulators, are perceived as high in autonomy and competent hence they can derive the sort of
tee ak: regulated legitimacy through following the rules, regulations and standards. Overall my work is advocating for more transparency in the whole corporate political
tee ak: process. E.g. having public records of election campaign donations as in the case with most developed countries. So that's my presentation. And thank you so much for listening. Any questions?
Katrine Sundsbo: Thank you so much Oluwatosin. We're doing questions now through the Q&A. If you have any questions, remember to put them through the Q&A.
Katrine Sundsbo: Hannah will be leading the Q&A now so
Katrine Sundsbo: over to you.
Hannah Pyman: So we've got a few questions in the chat. So I'll start with one of those. So we had a question here from
Hannah Pyman: Nahida for Kathryn. So she asked Catherine did you find any problems regarding PB or DP. So, for example, carers being labeled as caring for the sake of gaining financial help or reward other from the person they were caring for or other family members.
Kathryn Chard: Erm,
Kathryn Chard: If I've understood the question correctly, it's
Kathryn Chard: asking whether the participants in the study, were they, actually could you just repeat the question again for me Hannah? Sorry.
Hannah Pyman: Yep, so, did you find any problems regarding PD or DP,
Hannah Pyman: was the first question, and then she said, for example, carers being labeled as caring for the sake of gaining financial help or reward, either from the person they were caring for, or from other family members.
Kathryn Chard: Yeah, no generally the percentage of participants in my sample were all people who'd been caring for between three and fifty years,
Kathryn Chard: so they all had significant caring responsibilities. And because the personal budget amount that they're receiving for direct payment was such a small sum of money
Kathryn Chard: nobody would be looking for a direct payment as a means of reward, financial reward in any shape or form because they were such insignificant sums.
Kathryn Chard: If you know in comparison to the amount of care that people were providing that if they weren't providing that care, the state would have to step in. So, for example, a typical direct payment would be
Kathryn Chard: about 50 pounds a week. And so for somebody who's caring for example for 35 to 50 hours a week
Kathryn Chard: they would be saving the state on average several thousand pounds a week if they weren't providing care and the local authorities have to. So in terms of sort of cost benefit
Kathryn Chard: it's absolutely in the state's interest to support carers because they save the public purse on average, it's an estimate of about 130 billion pounds every year in the UK, so their contribution is massive in terms of what they get financially.
Hannah Pyman: Great thank you. That's crazy those figures,
Hannah Pyman: when you put it like that. It's unbelievable.
Hannah Pyman: We'll go to a question for Priyasha. So this was a question from Marina. So does the neuro economy study show that people use a specific part of the brain, she believes that was sensor 14, to read emotions and
Hannah Pyman: reactions from the person they're communicating with?
priyasha khurana: So when they were hypothesizing the study they specifically targeted the right brain because right hemisphere is more involved in strategic judging
priyasha khurana: other person's intentions, and they found that, they hypothesized, for both the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction
priyasha khurana: but the only found synchrony in the temporal parietal junction, that was the channel 14 which we saw in the results with more significant results. Yeah, so that's correct.
Hannah Pyman: Great, thank you. We've got another question here for Kathryn. So find that people from different backgrounds have varied responses to the PB/DP
Hannah Pyman: depending on their social economic background. So, for example, some people may not be able to join the gym, even if they could afford it because of time?
Kathryn Chard: Absolutely, and the population in my sample was very diverse in terms of the age of the carer, the length of the caring role and the nature of the caring role. So I had
Kathryn Chard: a number of participants who were parent carers. Some were in their 80s who had been caring for 50 plus years.
Kathryn Chard: They were all carrying for adults because the Care Act is an adult piece of legislation so I didn't include anybody who was caring for some under 18, or any young carers in the study,
Kathryn Chard: and absolutely carers who had, who will have better socio economic circumstances. So, for example, they can afford to pay for equipment that ease their caring. So, for example, one of the participants of the sample had
Kathryn Chard: purchased an internal lift on the ground floor to the first floor, which meant that she didn't have to help her husband to get up and down the stairs.
Kathryn Chard: That was a big help, it had a big positive effect on her physical well being and whereas other carers we see
Kathryn Chard: relying on carers allowance or disability benefit spending, these sorts of income,
Kathryn Chard: had to rely on the local authority waiting list to get assessments to have the authority pay for equipment like, for example, a stair life, or ramps for example and so on.
Kathryn Chard: So, absolutely, the level of your income has a, it masively had a significant impact on how you cope with a caring role.
Kathryn Chard: And similarly, the older carers in the sample particularly those who had also been caring for a long time reported poorer health
Kathryn Chard: and well being compared to the carers in the sample who perhaps had been caring for less time.
Kathryn Chard: And similarly the intensity of the caring role has a big difference too. So people who are involved in more practical aspects of caring like shopping,
Kathryn Chard: cooking, cleaning, have a very different experience of care compared with those who we describe as really having the heavy end of personal care. The lifting and moving and handling, hoists and and the carrying out quite, more substantial personal care can have a big differential impact depending on the type of job.
Kathryn Chard: So yes, because in my sample as well personal budgets were, it was a one size fits all approach for participants, so they were all given personal budgets in exactly the same way,
Kathryn Chard: to do the same thing, which was replacement care. So of course it didn't take into account that difference between
Kathryn Chard: the individuals in the sample. So the idea that personal budgets are personalized solution, individualized based on your individual needs and circumstance wasn't also reflected in the policies defined at all unfortunately.
Hannah Pyman: That's really interesting, thank you. We've got a question here for Olivia.
Hannah Pyman: If you're still there Olivia?
Hannah Pyman: Yeah.
Hannah Pyman: So we've got a question here. What archives did you need to conduct research, and was it easy to find information about your research area?
olivia arigho-stiles: Yeah, so the chapter I look at here, the archives I used, so the research we did the project as a whole is based in archives in La Paz and Sucre.
olivia arigho-stiles: But a lot of the texts I drawn on here are actually in the British Library and in Senate House library. So I'm working from a lot of published sources, but yeah it's incredibly difficult.
olivia arigho-stiles: I mean, working with Bolivian archives can be quite difficult anyway, there's a lot of
olivia arigho-stiles: thing missing, for example. In terms of the biographical information about the writers I look out, although
olivia arigho-stiles: I didn't have enough time to draw out a lot of the texts that form part of the chapter, but there's very little biographical information available.
olivia arigho-stiles: Very little information at all about the writers, apart from Jaime Mendoza who is more well known and
olivia arigho-stiles: and then a few few other writers like [unknown] are very, very well known. But yeah, it's been a huge challenge in just trying to gather information about the writers.
olivia arigho-stiles: And that goes for the project as a whole, particularly in the earlier, the pre 1950s periods. First off, the 20th century. There just isn't a lot of archival material available.
olivia arigho-stiles: And a lot of it is housed so outside the public archives, like in Sucre, the National Archives and La Paz which has number, there are a lot of these local archives,
olivia arigho-stiles: that are, unless you know about them. So a lot of the secondary literature I drawn on, particularly from people like [unknown] he uses personal archives, just community based micro archives,
olivia arigho-stiles: which is very difficult. I don't have access to that, I don't have personal connections for that either. So I'm conscious there's probably a lot more material out there, but I'm just not, I don't have access to it.
olivia arigho-stiles: .
Hannah Pyman: Yeah that must make it really hard. Thank you. We've got a question here for Oluwatosin. You mentioned that there was a development of industry matter and not necessarily the country. Can you elaborate on this?
Hannah Pyman: Oh, you're muted. Sorry.
tee ak: So basically what the research, previous antecedents of corporate political strategy and activities are sort of
tee ak: focused on the fact that depending on if their institutional lapses then this necessitates the fact that multinationals should, when multinationals coming into this
tee ak: countries such as, you know, Africa, countries such as Nigeria, or even though the emerging economies like
tee ak: China, right, because their institution lapses it should automatically go in thinking that they have to
tee ak: engage in some sort of corporate political strategies and in fact the most advice usually would be the relational strategy. But now from the research what we do find is that multinationals
tee ak: do not, or even firms, do not typically go into this country's or economy's thinking, do not want to go into these
tee ak: situations thinking that you want to engage in relational strategy. And if the rules, depending on the industry,
tee ak: like my research found in highly regulated industry where the rules are clear, well stipulated, if you follow the rules for instance, in telecommunications, you get what you want.
tee ak: They would typically like to have some sort of regulated legitimacy by interacting with regulators themselves or following the rules as opposed to engaging in any form of corporate political strategy. So that's the point regarding that.
Hannah Pyman: Right, thank you. We're running out of time, but we've got two more questions. One is for you gain, Oluwatosin. Do international agencies have any role to help in legitimacy building?
tee ak: Um, that's a very interesting question, and I think the answer is yes. Because they can either support or put pressure on the African governments, like I said in my presentation through aid,
tee ak: through very obvious means like the aid development assistance for them to have very clear rules. Because again, one of the major findings from my work was
tee ak: in industries that were considered weak, or perceived weak by multinationals, weak in the sense that they were low in autonomy and low in competence, right, we found that most nationals in
tee ak: those industries had to engage in CPA. So it's about strengthening the regulations and again
tee ak: like I said, the regulations are there, but it's just that it's outdated, or it's not been enforced. So they can either put pressure on the African government, or to sort of have very, to have stronger regulations or stronger regulation enforcement if that explains it.
Hannah Pyman: Great, thank you. And then one final quick question. I know some people might have to move on to something else but one last question for Kathryn.
Hannah Pyman: Is there a scale the government uses to quantify different levels of caring? So caring for two different people can consume different amounts of time, for example. And if so, how does that affect the personal benefit?
Kathryn Chard: Yeah, that's a really good question. So if you are looking after someone because they have an illness or a disability, then the government would call you a carer.
Kathryn Chard: But obviously, you can be looking after people as part of your family life, for example you may have children. And so the Care Act
Kathryn Chard: is specifically a piece of law in terms your carer's responsibility for people who have an illness or a disability.
Kathryn Chard: So the funding that comes through the Care Act piece of law through the local authority in the form of a personal budget is different to the financial benefit we might get, for example, if you
Kathryn Chard: were in receipt of carer's allowance that comes from a different part of the state social security system. For example you've got caring responsibility for children that it might be that you might get a child benefit through the social system. So in terms of how they interact, if you
Kathryn Chard: are on a disability benefit and you're also a carer, then actually, it may be that you're better off financially having a disability benefit because we all know that
Kathryn Chard: when we talk about carers, we're not talking about a necessarily healthy population or group of people. A lot of people with caring responsibilities are actually supporting themselves. So actually, then we have another disability.
Kathryn Chard: Sometimes you're better off claiming expenses benefit without carer's allowance. Carer's allowance is paid at 67 pounds a week,
Kathryn Chard: but to claim that you have to be caring for a minimum of 35 hours a week or more. So it's not a significant amount of money for 35 hours worth of
Kathryn Chard: work that's considered an income replacement benefit. And so, of course, it's only eligible for people 65 years of age and younger. So, of course, people care beyond the age of 65 so
Kathryn Chard: there could be differences in pension contributions once you're a carer over 65, you get a carer's premium. But again,
Kathryn Chard: there's a cost and pay off in terms of disability benefits and carer's allowance being taken off pound by pound, pound for pound, depending on any of the overlapping rules that exist. I'm not a benefits expert by any means. So that's the kind of basic explanation, I hope that answers the question.
Hannah Pyman: Thank you. I think it's very complicated, there are lots of different levels.
Kathryn Chard: Yeah.
Hannah Pyman: Really interesting. Thank you. I think that's all the questions we had for now.
Hannah Pyman: Thanks guys for answering them all.
Katrine Sundsbo: Yeah, I just want to say thank you to all our presenters today, really interesting topics. So thank you Kathryn,
Katrine Sundsbo: Priyasha, Olivia, and Oluwatosin for presenting today. And thank you for all of those who joined us in watching the webinar.
Katrine Sundsbo: Hope you have a good rest of the day and hope to see you again soon in another Newcomers Presents.
olivia arigho-stiles: Thank you.
Kathryn Chard: Thank you very much.
Bye.
tee ak: Bye.