Social Sciences - OU Community Online

Around the world there are a number of professions in high demand. The BBC Business website has compiled a list of the top 20 most wanted professions internationally, and the countries that want them.

The list includes psychologists, physiotherapists and chefs, and there are case studies.

Is your profession there? Check it out on Global migrants: Which is the most wanted profession?

Children in Britain are more exposed to alcohol marketing than adults are, according to the OU's Professor of Social Marketing Gerard Hastings.

He calls for urgent changes to Britain's 'flawed' drinks advertising regulations in an editorial in the British Medical Journal, which is published to coincide with a major report calling for all alcohol advertising to be banned.

The editorial cites research by the Rand Corporation for the European Commission which shows that 10-15 year olds in the UK see 10% more alcohol advertising on TV than their parents do. When it comes to alcopops, they see 50% more.

And the situation is set to worsen as advertisers increasingly spread their messages via digital media, say Gerard Hastings and co-author Nich Sheron, clinical hepatologist at the University of Southampton.

Their comments coincide with the publication of Health First: an evidence-based alcohol strategy for the UK, a report which calls for a ban on all alcohol advertising, and minimum alcohol pricing. Gerard Hastings is a member of the strategy group which compiled the report.

To see Gerard Hastings discussing the proposed strategy with Professor Linda Bauld, University of Stirling, go to this link. 

Further information

Professor Gerard Hastings is a member of The Open University's Centre for Strategy and Marketing. He is founder/director of the Institute for Social Marketing and Centre for Tobacco Control Research based at Stirling University and The Open University. He is currently leading APISE, a major study of the effectiveness of alcohol control policies.

The British Medical Journal editorial Alcohol Marketing: Grooming the Next Generation was published on 1 March. Current OU students can access it via the OU Library using their Open University Computer Username (OUCU) and password. Its reference is BMJ 2013;346:f1227. For help in accessing electronic journals through the OU Library database go to How can I get access to a particular journal on the Library website.

Posted 26 March 2013

 

Image: Thinkstock

A new OU/BBC series captures a day in the life of one of the world's largest publicly-funded health services.

Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day is an epic eight-part observational documentary starting Tuesday 26 March at 9pm on BBC2.

It tells the stories of a single 24-hour period in the NHS from a multitude of perspectives, following a diverse range of staff, and patients. 

The OU team working on the series say it is of particular interest to Health and Social Care students, as it takes a broad view of health care delivery that moves beyond the ‘typical’ doctor-led focus in acute care to explore the relationships between service users and providers.

OU academic advising on the series are Dr Carol Komaromy and Dr Jonathan Leach. 

Explore further
Check out the OpenLearn series page online interactive feature  telling the story of the changing nature of health care from before the birth of the NHS to the present day.

There is a booklet associated with the series, Working to Save Lives, which gives a personal view of day-to-day life as an NHS healthcare professional. For a free copy, call 0845 271 0015 or go to the OpenLearn page.

More information

• Health and social care courses and qualifications at the OU

 

Posted 25 March 2013 

Ever had your enjoyment at a live performance spoilt by collective coughing fits from the audience? The theatre critic James Agate once reflected: 'Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.' 
 
I once played Albert the Horse in Alan Bennett's lovely adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and during every matinee I was forced to neigh disapprovingly at children whooping loudly every time my wise old talking horse was about to save Toad from another disaster. Rumour has it that the cast of The Sound of Music referred to the show as The Sound of Mucus, so deafening were the coughs and sneezes coming from the auditorium during every performance. The concert hall too is notorious for audience participation, sometimes of the wrong kind. Alfred Brendel, the pianist, once chastised his audience: 'either you stop coughing or I stop playing.' 
 
Now we might know why people cough in auditoriums.  In a new report entitled Why do people (not) cough in concerts? The economics of concert etiquette, (see story here) Professor Andreas Wagner of the University of Hannover claims that coughing is 'excessive and non random'. Coughing is seen as an acceptable form of audience participation by many participants. Coughing is a 'wilful action'.
 
The research revealed that the average concertgoer coughs at 0.025 times a minute, a rate double the normal average of 18 coughs a day. 
 
I am sure we all have sympathy with Downton Abbey author and screenwriter Julian Fellowes who famously, last year, explosively rebuked a fellow audience member who was coughing persistently in the next row at the Royal Court in London. 'You must stop coughing', he barked. After the outburst you could not hear a pin drop, only the actors on the stage.
Dick Skellington 22 March 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

More than 109,000 people have taken part in the BBC Lab UK’s Big Money Test which was launched in April 2011 by money saving expert Martin Lewis.

The OU’s Professor Mark Fenton-O’Creevy, together with fellow academics Professor Adrian Furnham and Dr Sophie von Stumm, reveal what they learned from the results.  It's clear that there is far more to managing your money than just financial know-how.

Key discoveries:

• While financial knowledge is important, our emotions play a big part in how well we manage our money
• Money makes many people feel worried, guilty and anxious
• Impulse shopping can lead to disastrous financial problems
• If money makes you feel powerful you are more likely to encounter money problems, but if money makes you feel secure you are less likely to
• Being able to make ends meet is crucial for us to be able to manage our money well, more so than financial knowledge
• Attitude to money and financial success tend to improve with age, even more so for men than women

Read the results in full.

Find out more:

• Check out OpenLearn's You and your money
• Read Professor Fenton-O'Creevy's blog on emotional finance
• Professor Mark Fenton-O’Creevy

Posted: 20 March 2013 

Meg Barker looks a little deeper at what can be done to alleviate human suffering

I gave a talk recently at the University of East Anglia on the history of self help books. I wanted to understand far more about why they came to be the way they are. I also managed to chart one potential future trajectory of self-help, building on this criticism. For this I particularly considered the writing of Oliver Burkeman: one of my favourite discoveries over the last couple of months thanks to his entertaining and radically different approach. I'll outline some of his ideas here so that you can see what an alternative to conventional self-help might look like. You can view the presentation I gave here.

Self-help history: empowerment or victimisation
Examining the history of self-help we can see that books in this genre have tended to be of two types. The first type – empowerment self-help – emerged in America after the great depression and drew on the New Thought movement which believed in the power of positive thinking. Such books held out the promise that by imagining good things and striking the right attitude people could bring what they wanted to themselves: wealth, friends, success, etc. The second type of self-help became popular in the late sixties and seventies. Know as victimisation self-help, books in this category tend to blame the wider world for any problems that individuals have. Akin to the twelve step programmes for addiction, these books are concerned with reassuring readers that their difficulties are not their fault but down to something beyond their control like having toxic parents or a disorder or disease of some kind. Power is located outside the individual. 

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a backlash against victimisation self-help and a return to an extreme form of empowerment self-help which argued that any problems were down to the individual and could be fixed by positive thinking. For example, a quote in the bestseller The Secret by the author's fellow self-help writer, Bob Proctor, says: “Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that’s being earned? Do you think that’s an accident? It’s designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret, and now you are being introduced to The Secret.” The Secret in question is the New Thought law of attraction, that successful people bring positive things to themselves merely by thinking about them.

Both these forms of self-help are problematic, and together they set up a false binary around human struggles, which is similar to the either/or view of mental health which I've discussed elsewhere. It seems that we have to believe either that we are personally responsible for all our problems but that we can fix them by changing ourselves, or that the world is responsible for all our problems but that we are powerless then to do anything about them. If we buy into the empowerment way of seeing things then it easily slips into victim blame, whereby we regard everyone, including ourselves, as to blame for any problems in life. If we buy into the victimisation way of seeing things then we have to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us and give up any sense that we could do anything about our difficulties.

A third way? Oliver Burkeman
In recent years it seems that a few authors have been looking for a kind of third way of doing self-help: a way that involves breaking out of this problematic binary. What I have called anti-self-help self-help starts from a criticism of the assumptions of the self-help movement in general. It asks questions about whether it is actually good to strive for the things that self-help suggests that we strive for: happiness, wealth, success, a romantic relationship, etc. Are these good things to have and, even if they are, is striving for them the best way of going about it? Anti-self-help self-help locates any problems that we have in the wider society that surrounds us, the messages we receive from it, and how we relate to these, rather than seeing us as isolated individuals responsible for everything that happens to us. But, at the same time, it sees us as actively engaged with this wider world and able to engage with it in different ways, rather than as powerless. 

A great example of such anti-self-help self-help is the writing of Oliver Burkeman. Like his Guardian newspaper column, This Column Will Change Your Life, his first book Help! presented an analysis of existing self-help books, attempting to pull out actually useful suggestions from the overwhelming mass of contradictory messages that he found. His second book, The Antidote, builds on the criticisms of self-help that he came to when writing Help! and suggests a radically different approach. 

Positive thinking, argues Burkeman, actually makes us suffer. The empowerment self-help movement has got it completely wrong. What he offers in its place refuses the disempowering position of victimisation self-help, but instead embraces the potentials of what he calls a 'negative path'. This draws on a cluster of approaches taken from philosophies from Buddhism to Eckhart Tolle, the Stoics of Ancient Greece to the Mexican Day of the Dead. What these have in common is that they all do the opposite of 'positive thinking', instead turning to face the difficult stuff of life.

Thus Burkeman argues for the benefits of meditating on the inevitable fact of our own mortality. He critically evaluates the way in which we tend to react to 'bad things' in our day-to-day life, and considers alternatives where we recognise our own role in categorising what is good and bad and trying to get all of the former and none of the latter. He explores meditation and building the capacity to be with difficult feelings, turning towards the things that scare us rather than away from them. He considers the power of just getting on with tasks we are avoiding, rather than assuming that we have to 'find our passion' or 'get motivated' before we can do anything. He explores the value in considering the worst that could happen (and whether what is happening is 'just bad' or 'absolutely terrible') as well as asking yourself whether you have a problem right now, in the present moment. He questions who this self is that we are trying to improve through self-help, and wonders whether it might be more useful to reflect on whether such a thing really exists in any meaningful sense, rather than assuming that it does and engaging in a futile quest to make it better.

I loved The Antidote because it resonates so well with the answers (and – perhaps more usefully – questions) that I have come to through my own journey through the ways in which psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and sociology have understood human suffering and what can be done about it. Like my work, the book is particularly rooted in Buddhist philosophy and it is very nice to see that engaged with so thoughtfully, rather than just being offered as another set of techniques to make people happier.

The anti-self-help self-help manifesto
Where to from here? I would like to see many more anti-self-help self-help books which start from a critical stance towards the self-help industry and offer something more valuable to people who want to think about how they are living and how they might do it differently. Such work would, I think, share some of the following things in common:

• A critical stance towards conventional self-help

• A critical stance towards normative taken-for-granted ideas about what makes a good person and a successful life, and whether happiness and wealth are the best things to be striving for

• An informed understanding of the problems with telling people that they are flawed in some way and need to change by striving after something different

• Drawing on research evidence from psychology and sociology, as well as philosophical understandings from across the globe (not just the 'west'), in order to suggest what might be helpful to people

• Locating people's problems in the inter-relation between them and the world around them rather than entirely internally or entirely external – regarding people as biopsychosocial beings rather than focusing on one of those aspects (bio, psycho, social) to the exclusion of the others

• Suggesting ways forward which involve engaging with the world differently, and recognising how difficult this can be and arguing for wider social change, rather than putting all responsibility on the individual

• An ethical commitment to putting something different 'out there' even though the publishing industry conservatively continues to try to publish the same kinds of messages as before

I'd be very interested to hear from others who are trying to write blogs, books, articles, etc. in this vein, and to continue to discuss whether a 'negative path' or 'anti-self-help' does present a valuable third way.

Find out more
There is more about self-help with useful links to other work here. 

Meg Barker 7 March 2013
Meg Barker is an Open University lecturer teaching mainly on counselling modules, and is also a therapist specialising in relationships. Find her other blogs here. 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain 

Humanity is headed for a very difficult future unless we change our ways soon, according to The Open University's Emeritus Professor of Renewable Energy Godfrey Boyle (pictured).

In an interview for Indian website Zee News about climate change, he says that technology is part of the solution but we also need social and cultural shifts – in particular, a move away from consumerism.

Read Godfrey Boyle's interview here.

Useful links

• Godfrey Boyle
• T213 Energy and sustainability

Santa Claus operated out of Frankfurt last year – and gave the Eurozone the fiscal equivalent of several billion stocking-fillers. But the European Central Bank’s largesse may not extend to those who don’t believe in it, writes Alan Shipman.

The season of miraculous gift-giving is over, but Europeans are still playing happily with their earliest and biggest Christmas present. Santa Claus turned out to be a central banker – and one willing to dispense on the promise of future good behaviour, disregarding recent misdemeanours.  

A single act of generosity by Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank (ECB) governor, has restored lasting calm to the previously turbulent Eurozone, neatly deflecting the winter blizzards across the Atlantic.

Draghi’s most dramatic achievement is to have radically reduced the cost of borrowing for Italy, Spain and other Eurozone countries that have large budget deficits to finance. This cost (the ‘bond yield’) fell to less than 5% in Spain’s early-January auction, from a crisis peak of more than 7.5%. It is a similar story in Draghi’s native Italy, where the public finances have been so effectively shored-up that voters can even contemplate a Silvio Berlusconi comeback. By promising ‘outright monetary transactions’ (OMT), the ECB has asserted the market-stabilising power long enjoyed by its American equivalent, the Federal Reserve. As a result, investors searching for higher yields have now moved back into corporate bonds and shares, lifting Eurozone stock markets to their highest level for two years.

From regarding the Euro area as a sinking ship that would either have to ditch its weakest members or be dragged underwater by them, some investors now view it as a better sovereign borrower than the previously mighty US. Both are currency zones with wide fiscal deficits. At present the US has a more impressive growth rate, while there is still a risk of weaker Eurozone members being cut adrift and forced into default. But in the longer term – if it can now hold together – the Eurozone has a better external balance (exporting more than it imports, thanks to Germany), greater power to impose fiscal discipline on its members, and stronger safeguards against unleashing inflation (sovereign borrowers’ traditional way of short-changing their creditors after securing the cash).

Debt guarantee 
Perhaps most remarkably, Draghi has achieved this monetary escapology without having to part with a single euro of ECB funds. All he has done is announced that his bank will, in future, buy up the debt of any Eurozone country that is forced to default. This guarantees the debt of Italy, Spain and other struggling member-states, making it safe for ordinary investors (and investment funds) to buy. Their governments can now continue to finance the public investment needed to restore growth so that banks and households can bring down their own debt, and the costs of welfare support until new jobs emerge.

The announcement was well timed, coming at a moment when banks and bond-buyers are globally desperate for high-yielding issues, and prefer those which have a government behind them, regardless of quality. After all, Ukraine with an economy stalled by sliding steel sales and politics sliding back into industrial oligarchy and Latvia bailed-out by the IMF in 2008 and dragged through Europe’s deepest ever recession have recently made successful bond issues, despite having higher currency risks and lower credit ratings than any Eurozone member.

Neither Spain nor Italy, the most dangerous of the Eurozone’s weak links, has asked for a bailout so far. Both know that, if they do so, they will be subject to a German-driven, EU-administered ‘adjustment programme’ – worsening their already perilous economic and social situation, and probably discrediting whichever government has to enforce the emergency measures. Their additional borrowing is raising the scale of any future rescue effort. The ECB’s calculation is that, by making it clear that all Euro debt will be honoured in the event of a bailout, this becomes less likely to happen. That’s because member countries now have the fiscal strength required to drive a recovery, and because speculators will stop short-selling the debt in order to fulfil their own expectations of its collapse. The ECB’s promise buys time for governments to act so that the promise won’t need to be fulfilled.

Cross-Channel fallout
If this gamble works, it should be good for other European governments – notably the UK, which will blame its imminent return to recession on the weakness of demand and investor confidence in the single currency area. But in one important respect, the Eurozone’s improbable gain is its non-members’ loss. The UK had retained its top AAA credit rating, allowing it to finance its overrunning budget deficit at negligible cost, partly because it was regarded as a ‘safe haven’ for investment funds that felt at risk from Eurozone exposure. Now that Euro debt has been turned into a positive one-way bet, that of the UK doesn't look so enticing.

A credit-rating downgrade need not (as the US has demonstrated) cause any rise in UK interest rates, or loss of confidence in its turnaround strategy. But it makes it harder to maintain the present low rates long enough to complete the banks’ recapitalisation and float Britain’s mortgage borrowers off the rocks. 

Mario Draghi is unlikely to be on George Osborne’s Christmas Card list at the end of 2013. But if his gamble succeeds, it’s a small price to pay.
Alan Shipman 24 February 2012

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain 

 

 

The high-speed rail track is the latest signal that the route to deficit reduction now runs via ‘saving to spend,’ explains Alan Shipman.

Banks’ recent mishaps with ‘financial innovation’ have demanded some unusual displays of Finance-Minister innovation. And George Osborne has confirmed his role as one of the most innovative modern Chancellors, even before he prepares to deliver the next Budget in March.

In expanding the UK government’s infrastructure-building commitments while pushing for another round of welfare spending cuts, Osborne has gone the opposite way to most of his post-war predecessors. They tended to let the welfare budget expand, as the inevitable consequence of falling income and rising social need during recession. To fund it, they traditionally swung the axe over capital projects – trusting that most existing roads, railways, power stations and public buildings could creak along for another year without major upgrades or replacement.

The northern extension of HS2 (see this Guardian video is just the latest in a long line of contrarian Coalition commitments, which also include a revived school rebuilding programme, support for the Crossrail project whose cost was questioned in opposition, and a new way of letting big institutions finance public investment projects. Although capital spending reductions announced in 2010 have not yet been fully reversed, it is now clear that further cuts to the government’s redistribution and running-costs will be used to finance new capital projects, and not directly repay debt.

The Coalition headstand 
Past Chancellors have usually taken the opposite approach to ‘fiscal rebalancing’ because cuts to benefits and tax credits are more socially (and electorally) painful than cuts to most infrastructure projects. Indeed, big civil engineering plans often bring some distinctly uncivil responses from the ruling parties’ supporters, as confirmed by those living close to the proposed high-speed route (see HS2 route set to trigger fresh protests).

Economically, spending more on benefits has the merit of immediately boosting demand, by putting money into some of the poorest pockets – shortening the post-Christmas roster of retail-chain closures, even if not enough on its own to get the economy growing again. A higher welfare bill is traditionally the ‘automatic stabiliser’ that helps to end the recession which gave rise to it. In contrast, even a ‘shovel-ready’ infrastructure project can take months to get into motion.  Those crossing affluent backyards can take years, even when planning procedures are fast-tracked to HS2 speed.

Osborne has taken the opposite approach because investment is the key to long-term expansion. A consumption boost worked in 2009-10, restoring the economy to growth, because there was plenty of spare capacity. But three years and a double-dip later, it’s uncertain how much idle machinery can still be easily switched back on. With unemployment falling, the amount of easily-redrafted labour is also unclear. Some economists fear another burst of inflation as rising demand hits inflexible supply. So investment, which adds to capacity as it boosts demand, looks like the safest way to engineer an upturn.

Investor of last resort
Another powerful argument for more public investment was delivered to the Treasury Select Committee at the end of January, as it probed the impact of Quantitative Easing (QE) – the wholesale purchase of government debt by the Bank of England. QE has enabled the Bank to keep base rates interest at a historically low 0.5% throughout the recession, when the wider public deficit and above-target inflation would normally have been expected to send them up. Low interest rates were intended to promote economic recovery, by boosting business investment and reviving the housing market.

But pensioners’ and pension-fund managers’ representatives pointed out two serious side-effects. Low interest rates widen the deficit on the remaining final-salary pension schemes, forcing big companies to divert funds away from investment so as to plug the gap. Low rates also flatten the incomes of pensioners, and others now living on their savings – squeezing their own expenditure, and tying the helping hand that previously assisted younger family members with home-deposits and other big expenditures (see this article).

So for low interest rates to be sure of stimulating recovery, those who benefit most from them have got to be willing to spend more. The government is the biggest beneficiary, and will still enjoy the country’s cheapest credit even if agencies downgrade its currently top (AAA) credit rating. As the damage to pension funds is already done, QE’s overall success may now rely on the Treasury’s ability to splash the cash.

Infrastructure spending has one other major benefit from the Chancellor’s perspective. Because the public outlay can lever-in substantial private investment , and because much of it will take place beyond the Treasury’s 5-year budgeting horizon, the succession of big projects announced with increasing boldness since 2010 need not undermine the Coalition’s promise to eliminate the structural budget deficit.

Many economists are anyway convinced that governments should borrow for public investment, and that the UK should follow standard accounting practice by separating its capital budget (on which rising debts are usually justified by rising assets) from its budget for current expenditure, where debts incurred in downturns should be paid down during recovery. The Treasury’s own forecasting model was highlighting the need for more public capital spending, even before the release of disappointing fourth-quarter growth figures. Osborne’s break with tradition, to boost investment, is fast becoming the new orthodoxy. It should help sidestep the awkward question of whether HS2 will eventually get him (First Class) from Plan A to Plan B.

Alan Shipman 6 February 2013

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards