Quarterly Review of Research - October 2022

Re-producing public space: the changing everyday production of outdoor retail markets

Breines, Markus; Dahinden, Janine; Jónsson, Gunvor; Lindmäe, Maria; Madella, Marco; Menet, Joanna; Schapendonk, Joris; Van Eck, Emil; Van Melik, Rianne and Watson, Sophie (2022). Urban Geography

Professor Sophie Watson, as part of an international team, studied changes in outdoor retail markets as examples of public spaces that were disrupted by lock-downs due to Covid. Using examples from Spain, the UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands the team found that traders innovated their business models to extend the impact of retail markets beyond their physical boundaries and retained the importance of outdoor markets as social and political public spaces. The UK work was a collaboration with the National Federation of Market Traders and the National Association of British Market Authorities.

Taking the right course: the possibilities and challenges of offering alternatives to prosecution for drivers detected using mobile phones while driving

Savigar-Shaw, Leanne; Wells, Helen and Briggs, Gemma (2022). Accident Analysis & Prevention(173), article no. 106710.

Dr Gemma Briggs and collaborators at Staffordshire and Keele Universities, explore driver education as an alternative to prosecution for mobile phone use whilst driving. They used 46 semi-structured interviews of drivers, police officers, education providers and members of the public. They conclude that education offers opportunities for normative alignment with safe behaviours (rather that simple compliance with the law) and suggest their use in addition to penalties could be a pragmatic next step given current reductions in roads policing capability. This work fed into a successful grant bid by the team (led by Gemma), to the Road Safety Trust, to further explore the interactions of police officers and mobile phone-using drivers who they detect. Working with two police force partners, and supported by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the project aims to offer education to police officers on the dangers of handsfree mobile phone use (which, Gemma’s research shows is legal, but no safer than handheld use) so that they can offer appropriate, evidence-based roadside education to offenders, thus prioritising both safety and legality.

Children’s ability to recognize their parent’s face improves with age

Matthews, Claire M; Mondloch, Catherine J; Lewis-Dennis, Fallon and Laurence, Sarah (2022). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 223, article no. 105480.

Little is known about children’s ability to recognise familiar faces (e.g., friends/family). This is particularly important for children’s safety such as when recognizing their caregiver at the school gate or when out together in a crowded public place. Together with researchers at Brock University, Canada, the OU team measured the ability of children aged between 4 and 7 to recognise their parent in photographs taken before and after they were born. The findings suggest that young children have difficulty recognising instances that go beyond their direct experience with a person.

Tracking the nature and trajectory of social support in Facebook mutual aid groups during the COVID-19 pandemic

Ntontis, Evangelos; Fernandes-Jesus, Maria; Mao, Guanlan; Dines, Tom; Kane, Jazmin; Karakaya, Joshua; Perach, Rotem; Cocking, Chris; McTague, Michael; Schwarz, Anna; Semlyen, Joanna and Drury, John (2022). International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 76, article no. 103043.

Disasters and extreme events are often characterized by a sudden upsurge in the availability and provision of social support, with people with no previous affiliation to one another often coming together in a newly found sense of solidarity and camaraderie to support those in need. Groups organized through social media (e.g., Facebook) played a pivotal role in supporting those in need especially during the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, so in this paper the team explored how the provision of social support fluctuated in those groups over time and what types of support were offered or were requested through such platforms. They found that online social support activity declined soon after the peak of the first pandemic wave and, at least in Facebook mutual aid groups, during the second wave it did not reach the levels observed during the first wave. Groups became a catalyst for practical, informational, and emotional support to be offered or requested by those in need. The paper was part of a UKRI grant that addressed the role of groups in facilitating the public response to COVID-19, and our research team comprised of academics, psychology students, and members of community groups that organized to support those in need.

Transforming Biodiversity Governance. Earth Systems Governance

Schapper, Andrea; Visseren-Hamakers, Ingrid J; Humphreys, David and Bliss, Cebuan (2022). Mainstreaming the Animal in Biodiversity Governance: Broadening the Moral and Legal Community to Nonhumans. In: VisserenHamakers, Ingrid J and Kok, Marcel T.J. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–199.

This article argues that transformative biodiversity governance that fully realises ecocentrism requires a fundamental rethinking of the relationships between human beings, individual animals and nature. The authors propose, and examine the philosophical and policy implications of, an integrative biodiversity governance in which animal rights and, more broadly, the rights of nature are mainstreamed. Such a shift requires a rethinking of justice to embrace interspecies justice. The paper arose from a collaboration between colleagues in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands who have previously collaborated within the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO).

Citizenship studies: on the need for tradition and critique

Citizenship Studies, Darren Langdridge (2022).

This article is part of a 25th Anniversary special issue of the journal “Citizenship Studies” featuring contributions reflecting on the development of the study of citizenship over the last 25 years. Using work on sexuality and gender studies as the starting point, Professor Langdridge argues that we need to move beyond a politics of citizenship founded on an exclusionary logic that divides, and better recognize the need for – and value of – tradition in a dialectical relationship with critique. The point being that critique can itself become ideological when detached from tradition, with tradition and critique necessary opposites that act to temper each other. This piece is a precursor to the more detailed argument in a book on the same topic being published by Oxford University Press.

Proven and not proven: A potential alternative to the current Scottish verdict system

Behavioral Sciences & the Law. Curley, Lee John; Munro, James; Turner, Jim; Frumkin, Lara A.; Jackson, Elaine and Lages, Martin (2022).

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the influence that varying verdict systems had on juror decision making. A subject of great importance in the Scottish legal system as the Scottish Government are currently consulting the public on reforming the current verdict system. Three verdict systems were chosen for this investigation: 1) the current Scottish verdict system of guilty, not guilty and not proven (the latter being a second acquittal verdict); 2) the Anglo-American verdict system of guilty and not guilty; 3) a potential alternative verdict system of proven and not proven (as suggested by legal professionals in one of our previous papers). The results showed that conviction rates were higher in the guilty and not guilty verdict system when compared to the other two systems, showing that the decision environment influences the decisions jurors make. One possible explanation for this is that terms such as guilty and not guilty may promote emotional/punitive responses in the jurors, increasing the chances of them convicting the defendant, and terms such as proven and not proven may focus jurors on the evidence and attenuate the role that emotion plays. This research has been conducted in collaboration with the University of Glasgow, has been written about widely in the Scottish media and has informed a consultation piece aimed at the Scottish Government.

Infrastructure and the Politics of African State Agency: Shaping the Belt and Road Initiative in East Africa

Chiyemura, Frangton; Gambino, Elisa and Zajontz, Tim (2022). Chinese Political Science Review.

The paper is co-authored with the London School of Economics (LSE) and the University of Freiburg, Germany. All authors are early career researchers working in the area of China-Africa studies. The paper comes from a political and epistemological endeavour to understand how Africans (who in the literature have been majorly portrayed as passive actors) shape their engagements with China. The authors show the variegated nature of African state agency and how structures ‘condition’ but do not ‘determine’ how African actors shape and influence their relations with China. The paper observes that building collaboration is not an event. It’s a process which is time and resources consuming. 

‘Manufacturers without factories’ and economic development in the Global South: India’s pharmaceutical firms

Rault-Chodankar, Yves-Marie and Kale, Dinar (2022). Journal of Economic Geography.

In this paper, the authors explore the role of local Indian ‘manufacturers without factories’ (MWF) in establishing India as a leading supplier of pharmaceuticals worldwide, including in the global south. It shows that the different types of local MFWs - ‘propagandists’, ‘pioneers’, ‘connectors’ and ‘adaptors’ - help to bridge knowledge gaps in the Indian pharmaceutical industry and contribute to regional development by facilitating industrial upgrading in the south-south value chains. Building on this work, the team are planning to study the role of transnational Indian migrants in African countries in promoting entrepreneurship and industrial upgrading in the south-south pharmaceutical value chains.

The contribution of the spatial hydrological niche to species diversity in rare plant communities of English floodplain meadows

García-Baquero Moneo, Gonzalo; Gowing, David J. G. and Wallace, Hilary (2022). Plant Ecology 223:599–612.

This paper analyses data from a long-term study (1994-2018) to show the degree to which hydrological regime determines the plant-community composition of floodplain meadows, one of the most biodiverse systems in the UK. David Gowing’s co-authors were Hilary Wallace, a former research-project officer at the OU, and Gonzalo Garcia-Baquero, a former visiting scientist here. Gonzalo, now based at the University of Bilboa, is a world-leading ecological statistician, who undertook a complex analysis to separate hydrological effects from purely spatial effects on meadow-community structure. The paper addresses a long-running debate amongst ecologists as to whether species-rich communities are maintained through random processes or are structured by fine differences in their environment. The data suggests the latter with practical implications for the conservation of these special communities.

Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies

Semieniuk, G.; Holden, Philip B.; Mercure, J.-F.; Salas, P.; Pollitt, H.; Jobson, K.; Vercoulen, P.; Chewpreecha, U. Edwards, Neil R. and Viñuales, J. E. (2022). Nature Climate Change 

Philip Holden and Neil Edwards, as part of a USA and UK collaboration, explore the implications for investors of a fast phase-out of fossil-fuel production. They trace the equity risk ownership of >40,000 oil and gas production assets through a global equity network of 1.8 million companies and to their ultimate owners. The results show that financial risks concentrate in rich countries with large financial centres such as the USA and UK with potentially significant impacts on US and UK pension funds. The societal distribution impacts are being explored in collaboration with the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics.

Cenozoic evolution of deep ocean temperature from clumped isotope thermometry

Meckler, A. N.; Sexton, P. F.; Piasecki, A. M.; Leutert, T. J.; Marquardt, J.; Ziegler, M.; Agterhuis, T.;Lourens, L. J.; Rae, J. W. B.; Barnet, J.; Tripati, A. and Bernasconi, S. M. (2022). Science, 377(6601) pp. 86–90.

Philip Sexton’s work, with collaborators across Europe and in the USA, calls for a reassessment of ocean temperatures through the last 65 million years to better understand climatic responses to tectonic events and changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. The conventional approach to reconstruct past deep ocean temperatures is based on the analysis of the oxygen isotopic composition of the microfossil shells of benthic foraminifera. The authors exploit a new alternative approach using clumped isotope thermometry with the benefit that this method does not require any knowledge of the evolving oxygen isotope composition of seawater and is thus solely influenced by temperature, in contrast to the traditional oxygen isotope method. If the much warmer deep ocean temperatures for past ‘greenhouse’ climates revealed by the new method are found to be representative of the global ocean then Earth’s climate sensitivity to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would be much higher than previously thought, with major implications for our planet’s climate sensitivity to ongoing fossil fuel emissions.

New evidence for sedimentary volcanism on Chryse Planitia, Mars

P.; Hauber, E.; Conway, S.J.; Luzzi, E.; Mazzini, A.; Noblet, A.; Jaroš, J.; Fawdon, P. and Markonis, Y. (2022). Icarus, article no. 115038.

Peter Fawdon, a UK Space Agency Aurora Research Fellow in our School of Physical Sciences, published with researchers from the Czech Republic, Germany, France and Norway on kilometre-sized flows on Mars. This used remote sensing techniques to analyse the topography of these flows, the result of which supported a hypothesis that they are formed by deposition of low viscosity water-rich-mud. This work is part of a series of projects lead by Czech researchers Petr Brož and Ondřej Krýza, who, over the last 5 years with access supported by Europlanet, have been using the Mars environmental simulation chambers at the Open University to explore how mud flow behave in the martin surface conditions. This is fundamental work understanding sedimentary processes, has implication of accessing potential sub-surface habitats and supports the prioritisation of this site for future exploration.

Martian CO2 Ice Observation at High Spectral Resolution With ExoMars/TGO NOMAD

Oliva, F.; D’Aversa, E.; Bellucci, G.; Carrozzo, F. G.; Ruiz Lozano, L.; Altieri, F.; Thomas, I. R.; Karatekin, O.; Cruz Mermy, G.; Schmidt, F.; Robert, S.; Vandaele, A. C.; Daerden, F.; Ristic, B.; Patel, M. R.; LópezMoreno, J.J. and Sindoni, G. (2022). Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 127(5), article no. e2021JE007083.

This work analyses data from the NOMAD instrument that the OU co-leads on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission, currently orbiting Mars. We have used a particular spectral absorption feature to detect and track the seasonal advance and retreat of the Martian polar ice caps, which are primarily composed of carbon dioxide ice. This technique offers a new way to monitor the extent of the polar ice caps on Mars and its climate-related effects, as well as the detection of carbon dioxide clouds on Mars. This work was conducted with collaborators across Europe in an international consortium spanning five countries.

Methane emissions from trees planted on a closed landfill site

Fraser-Mcdonald, Alice; Boardman, Carl; Gladding, Toni; Burnley, Stephen and Gauci, Vincent (2022). Waste Management & Research.

Trees are often planted on closed landfill sites to improve the visual appeal of these areas. However, the potential release of greenhouse gases from the otherwise sealed area below the landfill cap has not previously been considered. This paper quantifies tree stem greenhouse gas emissions in a landfill context for the first time. The authors have subsequently developed this research to quantify tree stem emissions from different species and landfill sites with varying management practices. This paper is based upon PhD work carried out by the lead author, who is hoping to further develop this research as they start in a Lecturer role at The Open University in September.

Quantifying the influence of Open Access on innovation and patents

Jahn, Najko; Klebel, Thomas; Pride, David; Knoth, Petr and Ross-Hellauer, Tony (2022). Open Research Europe 2, article no. 64.

This paper combines publicly available data sources about patents and scholarly publications to explore the extent to which Open Access scientific literature is cited in patents. We find that the proportion of Open Access citations has been growing steadily, with nearly half of cited articles from within patents (between 2008-2020) being openly available. The paper is one of a number of publications resulting from the Observing and Negating Matthew Effects in Responsible Research & Innovation Transition (ON-MERRIT) project, a 30-month project funded by the European Commission to investigate how and if open and responsible research practices affect inequalities in research. As part of the project, partners from the UK, Austria, Germany and Portugal studied the effects of open science within academia (led by The Open University), industry and on policy development.

Risks of deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and bleeding after Covid-19: nationwide self-controlled cases series and matched cohort study

Katsoularis, Ioannis; Fonseca-Rodríguez, Osvaldo; Farrington, Paddy; Jerndal, Hanna; Lundevaller, Erling Häggström; Sund, Malin; Lindmark, Krister and Fors Connolly, Anne-Marie (2022). BMJ, 377, article no. e069590.

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the risk of blood clots following Covid infection in Sweden. The authors found that the risk was raised for several months thereafter, though the absolute risk remained low. The other members of this multidisciplinary team were all based in Sweden, with access to Sweden’s extensive facilities for linking different data sources. The OU contribution led to the BMJ asking Professor Farrington to write a separate commentary on the statistical methods.

A case study from Guyana of adapting engaged research design to promote ‘fairness in knowing’

Holliman, Richard; Marino, Alessandra; Grand, Ann; Berardi, Andrea; Mistry, Jay; Jafferally, Deirdre; Thomas, Raquel; Roberts, Grace; Marcus, Carol-Ann; Roopsind, Indranee and Roberts, Anthony (2022). Research for All, 6(1) pp. 1–17.

This paper provides a detailed process account of DETECT, a project that used an ethically-informed - engaged research design to create a socio-technical system to empower Indigenous communities’ mitigation of malaria in Guyana. Indigenous and OU researchers co-designed an early warning system to support local communities in identifying mosquito breeding sites. The paper outlines two frameworks, ‘engaged research design’ and ‘soft system methodology’, that have the potential to inform forms of participatory research and knowledge exchange in a wide range of academic disciplines. The authors conclude that those planning engaged research with historically oppressed communities should learn about community histories and epistemologies and attempt to contribute positively to the futures of those with whom they engage. This paper arose from the work of AstrobiologyOU.

Classifying simply connected wandering domains

Anna Miriam Benini, Vasiliki Evdoridou, Nuria Fagella, Philip J. Rippon and Gwyneth M. Stallard (2022). Mathematische Annalen, 383, 1127-1178.

This paper is one of the key achievements arising from an EPSRC funded project Classifying Wandering Domains led by Professors Phil Rippon and Gwyneth Stallard from the School of Mathematics and Statistics. Wandering domains are regions of stability under iteration of a complex function, with each domain mapping into a new domain. Although a detailed description of the dynamical behaviour inside periodic regions of stability has been known for over 100 years, this recently published paper gives the first classifications of the dynamical behaviour inside wandering domains. The EPSRC funding supported their postdoc Vasiliki (Vasso) Evdoridou who will return to the OU in January 2023 to start a lectureship in pure maths following postdoc positions at MSRI and Liverpool.

Accretion mode versus radio morphology in the LOFAR Deep Fields

Mingo, B; Croston, J H; Best, P N; Duncan, K J; Hardcastle, M J; Kondapally, R; Prandoni, I; Sabater, J; Shimwell, T W; Williams, W L; Baldi, R D; Bonato, M; Bondi, M; Dabhade, P; Gürkan, G; Ineson, J; Magliocchetti, M; Miley, G; Pierce, J C S and Röttgering, H J A (2022). Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 511(3) pp. 3250–3271.

The paper, led by OU Research Fellow Beatriz Mingo and Lecturer Judith Croston, and co-authored by several members of the LOFAR international collaboration, studied the radio galaxy populations in the LOFAR Deep Fields (LoTSS-Deep), to establish the role of host galaxies in feeding the black hole and shaping the radio jet. The results challenge traditional assumptions, by demonstrating that there is no direct link between black hole accretion rate and radio morphology: it's the host galaxy's mass that mostly controls how the jets propagate. Black hole accretion rate is best traced by specific star formation rate, which is linked to gas availability in the galaxy.

Trading disaster: Containers and container thinking in the production of climate precarity

Parsons, Laurie; Safra de Campos, Ricardo; Moncaster, Alice; Cook, Ian; Siddiqui, Tasneem; Abenayake, Chethika; Jayasinghe, Amila Buddhika; Mishra, Pratik and Billah, Tamim (2022). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

‘Natural’ and ‘local’ environmental disasters such as landslides, drought and flooding, are often no such thing; instead, they are at least in part caused by global supply chains and their effect on local economies. By examining three simple commodities traded from Asia to Europe, cotton, bricks and tea, this paper demonstrates a number of such impacts. The removal of top soil in Bangladesh for bricks leads to local flooding and crop losses, and in turn to increased social reliance on often indentured work in the polluting and toxic brick kilns; illegal logging is widespread in Cambodia, in order to fuel garment factories so they can compete with cheaper energy costs elsewhere, with the resulting deforestation having a direct impact on increasing droughts in the country; while the falling economic fortunes of the Sri Lankan tea industry combined with increased rainfall from climate change is leading to landslides, destroying workers’ tied plantation houses and leaving them homeless. The project was a multidisciplinary international collaboration led by Dr Laurie Parsons at Royal Holloway, and including academics from the Universities of Dhaka in Bangladesh and Moratuwa in Sri Lanka, and the OU, Exeter and Kings College London in the UK. At the OU the work has fed into wider reviews of the hidden carbon and wider environmental impact of the global and national construction industry, including work with the national Green Building Councils of Ireland, Spain, Croatia and Italy.

Further information on this project.

Increased atrial effectiveness of flecainide conferred by altered biophysical properties of sodium channels

O' Brien, Sian; Holmes, Andrew P.; Johnson, Daniel M.; Kabir, S. Nashitha; O' Shea, Christopher; O' Reilly, Molly; Avezzu, Adelisa; Reyat, Jasmeet S.; Hall, Amelia W.; Apicella, Clara; Ellinor, Patrick T.; Niederer, Steven; Tucker, Nathan R.; Fabritz, Larissa; Kirchhof, Paulus and Pavlovic, Davor (2022). Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology (166) pp. 23–35.

Despite recent technological and pharmacological advances, Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia and is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. One of the most common used drugs utilised in the treatment of AF is the sodium channel blocker, flecainide. A feared side effect, however, of sodium channel blocker therapy, is life-threatening ventricular pro-arrhythmia, but this appears to be relatively rare in patients with AF treated with flecainide. In the present study the authors utilised various techniques, including optical mapping, patch clamp electrophysiology, RNAseq and computer modelling to show specific differences in the properties of the sodium current between the atria and the ventricles which may be responsible for the apparent safety of flecainide in healthy ventricular tissue.

Curating smart cities

Cook, Matthew and Valdez, Miguel (2022). Urban Geography.

Urban environments are increasingly shaped by smart city developments which respond to various logics and shifting political agendas. Such smart city developments often render urban environments fragmented and even incoherent, resulting in which has been described as “Frankenstein urbanism”. Nonetheless this paper shows actors can engage in collective visioning and storytelling that may be usefully studied in terms of curation, framing and filtering successive smart city developments in service of their contextually defined long term goals such as sustainability. This paper results from a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council grant reference ES/N014421/1, Smart Cities in the Making: Learning from Milton Keynes.

Prediction of the axial lens position after cataract surgery using deep learning algorithms and multilinear regression

Langenbucher, Achim; Szentmáry, Nóra; Cayless, Alan; Wendelstein, Jascha and Hoffmann, Peter (2022). Acta Ophthalmologica.

With age, the lens in the human eye can become opaque, and in cataract surgery this is corrected by replacing the lens with an artificial implantable intraocular lens (IOL). Since this is a surgical procedure, it is not possible to assess the required correction subjectively by trying different lenses, as in the familiar opticians' procedure for fitting spectacle lenses. Instead, various predictive formulae are used to determine the optimum lens power from biometric measures of the eye such as the axial position of the IOL after implantation, with best results obtained by using the actual position rather than a default or standard value. Fortunately, as cataract surgery is one of the most common procedures in ophthalmology, large databases of biometric data and refractive outcomes are available and these can be used in statistical computational methods for IOL optimisation. This study, carried out by the Saarland University, together with universities and clinics in Germany, Austria and Hungary, and in collaboration with the OU, found that modern machine learning algorithms were more effective in predicting the lens position than traditional mutlilinear regression, and forms part of a series of similar studies on computational and statistical methods for optimising intraocular lens prediction and, hence improving refractive outcomes.

Results from The COPAINS Pilot Survey: Four new brown dwarfs and a high companion detection rate for accelerating stars

Bonavita, M; Fontanive, C; Gratton, R; Mužić, K; Desidera, S; Mesa, D; Biller, B; Scholz, A; Sozzetti, A and Squicciarini, V (2022). Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

With their mix of stellar and planetary characteristics, brown dwarfs represent the link between the heaviest planets and the lightest stars. Studying them is therefore essential to our understanding of both stellar and planetary populations. Unfortunately, wide-orbit brown dwarf companions are rare, plus their direct detection is extremely challenging from a technological point of view, as they are intrinsically faint. In fact, in almost three decades of searches only 40 detections had been reported, arising from surveys blindly targeting random stars from young clusters. This study completely changes the landscape, increasing the sample by 10% and proving that an efficient selection method can significantly improve the discovery rate, and push toward smaller masses, without the need of long surveys spanning several years.

Demonstration of a plant-microbe integrated system for treatment of real-time textile industry wastewater

Jayapal, Mohanapriya; Jagadeesan, Hema; Krishnasamy, Vinothkumar; Shanmugam, Gomathi; Muniyappan, Vignesh; Chidambaram, Dinesh and Krishnamurthy, Satheesh (2022). Environmental Pollution, 302, article no. 119009.

Freshwater resource scarcity and water pollution challenges are exacerbated by energy- intensive industries which are major users of fresh water. In this paper, a treatment system, developed with an attempt to achieve cost-effective, and sustainable rhizoremediation technology to treat real-time textile effluent and to overcome sludge production was found to be efficient. This RAENG Industry academia project resulted in training postgraduate students from India and UK. Future work focuses on developing low-cost catalyst integrating with plant microbe systems for efficient degradation of industrial effluents.

Corporate Diversification and Downsizing Decisions: International Evidence from Sharp and Sudden Performance Shocks

Ataullah, A., Le, H., Wang, Z. Wood, G. (2022), International Review of Financial Analysis, 82, 102203

Job losses have profound impacts on people’s lives. Within this context, this paper studies firms’ employment downsizing decisions in response to adverse operational shocks. Using a large cross-country dataset, we show that job cuts are common, for example 45% of firms with major shocks downsize at least 5% of the workforce and about 20% of firms downsize at least 20% of the workforce. A novel finding of this paper is that firms with multiple segments in diversified businesses are more likely to cut jobs than single-segment firms. The analysis also shows the significance of national employment protection and union power laws in downsizing decisions.

Abjection in extremely gendered colonial organizations: female military firefighter officers in Brazil

de Souza, Eloisio Moulin; Brewis, Joanna and Godfrey, Richard (2022). Human Relations pp. 1–24.

Jo Brewis and Richard Godfrey collaborated with Eloisio Moulin de Souza in Brazil on a study in which semi-structured interviews were conducted with all 17 female officers in the hypermasculine military firefighter organisation, Corpo de Bombeiros Militar, in the state of Espírito Santo. The experiences of these cis women highlighted concerns about the organization’s physical entrance test, in their experiences during pregnancy and as mothers, and in the predominance of masculine organizational grammar.

Maintaining police-citizen relations on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic

Ralph, Liam; Jones, Matthew; Rowe, Michael and Millie, Andrew. Policing and Society.

Matthew Jones and collaborators at Northumbria University and Edge Hill University undertook a robust qualitative study with police officers and staff across England who used official, semi-official or unofficial police social media accounts during the pandemic. The paper discusses three distinct stages during the first year of the pandemic progressing from an initial move to online engagement focussing solely on Covid-19 safety messages to promoting broader positive generic police activity. They found that social media enabled police to gauge an understanding of public perceptions in the early stages of lockdown and maintained relationships when face-to-face interactions were restricted.

This statement is true to the best of my knowledge and belief’: a provisional assessment of the utility of police victim statements in the qualitative understanding of domestic violence and abuse

Hopkins, Anna and Miller, Paul K. (2022). Journal of Gender-Based Violence (Early access).

Dr Anna Hopkins and collaborator Paul Miller (University of Cumbria) set out to study the potential role of police victim statements by victims of domestic violence and abuse as a research tool to access qualitative data from a group of victims for whom there are practical barriers to participating in research. From analysis of 120 statements, they concluded that with careful attention to methodological limitations these statements could be a useful research resource to complement primary qualitative data. This research has also opened a new collaboration with the STEM Faculty on coercive control.

Home-Based Self-Employment: Combining Personal, Household and Employment Influences

Daniel, Elizabeth and Owen, Robyn (2022). Journal of Enterprising Culture, 30(02) pp. 123–160.

Home-based self-employment is an important driver of increased business innovation and widening the opportunity to participate in entrepreneurship. This paper by Professor Elizabeth Daniel and collaborator Robyn Owen at Middlesex University addresses the under-researched nature of this type of business and employment by creating and validating a theoretical model drawing on established entrepreneurial theory. This study was undertaken before the COVID-19 pandemic but has lessons for future policy with implications extending to how future homes and towns are designed to enable a wider range of business to operate from home.

Talent management at doctoral level in English universities during the coronavirus pandemic

Martin, Lynn; Dabic, Marina and Lord, Gemma (2022). Thunderbird International Business Review.

This paper resulted from a collaboration between Gemma Lord and colleagues at Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Zagreb. A longitudinal study across eight UK universities during 2020 was undertaken. The paper discusses findings with implications for recruitment and retention of staff and students.

Older Carers and Carers of People with Dementia: Improving and Developing Effective Support

Larkin, Mary; Henwood, Melanie and Milne, Alisoun (2022). Social Policy and Society, 21(2) pp. 242–256.

Mary Larkin led a UK-based study, commissioned by the NHS England’s Commitment to Carer’s programme, about support for older carers and carers of people with dementia which is generalisable to other countries at a similar stage in the development of carer support. The study not only identified the ‘key ingredients’ of models of support that are valued by both groups of carers, but also the pivotal role played by the ‘process of support’ alongside the delivery of the support itself, and the importance of consistency of provision and of relationships between carers and care workers. Limited access to funding beyond a one-year period was found to be a primary barrier to the development of sustainable and effective support services for older carers and carers of people with dementia. This study contributes new knowledge about supporting these two groups of carers and ways in which services, and the associated commissioning processes, can be improved.

Insults according to notions of intelligence: Perspectives from education and newsmedia

Rix, Jonathan (2022). British Journal of Learning Disabilities.

Jonathan Rix reports on a study of 29 academic papers from 2016 to 2021 and 134 articles in English language newspapers to consider the use of terms relating to intelligence that may be considered slur or taboo words. People used idiot, imbecile and moron to denigrate others (usually because they disagreed with them for personal or ideological reasons), but did not wish to have them used about themselves. Their use evoked a range of understandings related to difference, making links between stereotypical, ‘unpopular' behaviours and a person's cognitive functioning. Given the fundamental role that the notion of intelligence plays both in society and to our sense of self and given our history of marginalizing the population to whom these terms were once applied, Jonathan suggests we should resist the everyday use of these words, just as we do with many historic terms associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and faith.

Does gender influence children’s and young people’s caring? A qualitative, systematic review and meta-ethnography

Boyle, Geraldine; Constantinou, Georgina and Garcia, Rebecca (2022). Children & Society.

There has been limited research undertaken into the role of children and young people in providing care in society. This systematic review and meta-ethnography highlights the gendered reproduction of children's and young people's caring which occurs across the global North and South. While the gendered nature of caring in adulthood has long been recognised, there has been limited academic and policy attention given to caring inequities across the lifecourse. The review was undertaken by researchers from the OU and the University of London. The work builds on previous research undertaken into the moral resilience of young adult carers and a recently completed study which investigated the role of voluntary organisations in England in facilitating young adult carers’ transitions to adulthood.

How much information is 'reasonable'? A qualitative interview study of the prescribing practices of palliative care professionals

Dumble, Katie; Driessen, Annelieke; Borgstrom, Erica; Martin, Jonathan; Yardley, Sarah and Cohn, Simon (2022). Palliative medicine.

As part of the ESRC-funded Forms of Care project, the authors supported palliative care clinicians to study how they negotiate information provision and consent for medications, especially in contexts when the information may cause distress for patients. It was found that whilst there is professional guidance about information provision, prescribing clinicians use as range of approaches to inform their clinical judgement in these instances, including: assessing the individual patient and their information preferences, tailoring information provision, and jointly forming a plan. Findings highlight that although current medical guidelines allow clinical discretion about information provision, in practice this can leave individual clinicians feeling vulnerable and unsupported, particularly those who have less experience and confidence in prescribing within palliative care practice. This is part of our larger ethnographic project on understanding how and when non-interventions are forms of care, and the complexities of providing palliative and end-of-life care acknowledging the non-clinical as well as clinical criteria professionals must consider.

The history of the history of learning disability

Tilley, Elizabeth and Jarrett, Simon (2022). British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50(2) pp. 132–142.

This article traces and summarises historiographical trends in the history of learning disability. It identifies three major waves of historical approaches (medical, social and cultural), each infused with wider political and professional concerns and shifting notions of what constitutes the idea of 'learning disability' in all its different linguistic iterations. The article also points to an emerging fourth wave in the historiography, led by 'historian activists' who seek to write and define their own history. In tracing these developments, the authors - Dr Liz Tilley, chair of the OU's Social History of Learning Disability Research Group (SHLD) and Dr Simon Jarrett, historian and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, UL, argue how the ‘work’ of history can and does act to inform attitudes, policy-making and change. 

Comparing the comparators: How should the quality of education offered by online universities be evaluated?

Brasher, Andrew; Whitelock, Denise; Holmes, Wayne; Pozzi, Francesca; Persico, Donatella; Manganello, Flavio; Passarelli, Marcello and Sangrà, Albert (2022). European Journal of Education.

This study analysed and compared university ranking systems that evaluate face-to-face education and quality assurance approaches for online education. The study then sought to understand how these instruments influence current student opinion and how they can be used more proactively by universities themselves. Integrating findings about the ranking metrics and quality processes used with a meta-analysis of literature about how students choose their university revealed that: (1) current ranking systems are of limited value for most potential undergraduate students, particularly with reference to online education, (2) comparison systems that can be of value to students from a variety of different backgrounds are likely to be complex to set up and run, and (3) quality indicators that promote both formative and summative evaluation may be beneficial to both institutions and students. The work was done in collaboration with teams led by Albert Sangrà, Professor of Education, e-learning expert and Director of the UNESCO Chair in Education and Technology for Social Change at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and Donatella Persico, Editor of the Italian Journal of Educational Technology.

Measuring player creativity in digital entertainment games using the Creativity in Gaming Scale

Hall, Johanna; Herodotou, Christothea and Iacovides, Ioanna (2022). In: Rienties, Bart; Hampel, Regine; Scanlon, Eileen and Whitelock, Denise eds. Open World Learning: Research, Innovation and the Challenges of High-Quality Education. London: Rutledge, pp. 158–170.

Digital games are often seen as a means to foster creativity by allowing gamers to experiment with different ideas and find solutions to challenging problems. The purpose of this paper was to understand and measure how creativity manifests in digital games. A digital games creativity scale has been developed and factor analysed with 251 gamers aged 18-34. Three expressions of creatively were identified: Appropriation, Problem-solving, and Affective change. Two factors were found to enable creativity: Design affordances that promote freedom of choice and Transferability facilitating transfer of learning of e.g., new skills, reflection, empathy to non-game contexts. This paper was led by a PhD student in IET, Joanna Hall. She completed her PhD in 2020 and since then she is working for the Office of National Statistics as a methodologist.