Scraping By and Making Do: Navigating New Zealand’s Welfare System

<p>In August 2017, debate over Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei’s declaration of two-decade-old benefit fraud sparked an ongoing discussion around poverty in New Zealand that revealed the fraying edges of the country’s welfare safety net. The perception that New Zealand has a low level of poverty and a fair, coherent welfare system that ensures those “deserving” of support receive what they need is untrue. Instead, there is an extraordinary disconnect between those responsible for running New Zealand’s welfare system and the daily experience of beneficiaries and NGO workers who must navigate the complex welfare landscape to address hardship. Patching together the threads of a fraying safety net, for New Zealand’s most vulnerable, is little-appreciated work, but crucial to their survival nonetheless. In this thesis, I explore how beneficiaries and NGO workers use tactics to manage the gaps between policy, practice and need created by state strategy in order to address hardship. I examine the resilience and experiential expertise of beneficiaries and NGO workers as they work around the limitations of state bureaucracy to address high levels of poverty in New Zealand.</p>

Scraping By and Making Do: Navigating New Zealand’s Welfare System

<p>In August 2017, debate over Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei’s declaration of two-decade-old benefit fraud sparked an ongoing discussion around poverty in New Zealand that revealed the fraying edges of the country’s welfare safety net. The perception that New Zealand has a low level of poverty and a fair, coherent welfare system that ensures those “deserving” of support receive what they need is untrue. Instead, there is an extraordinary disconnect between those responsible for running New Zealand’s welfare system and the daily experience of beneficiaries and NGO workers who must navigate the complex welfare landscape to address hardship. Patching together the threads of a fraying safety net, for New Zealand’s most vulnerable, is little-appreciated work, but crucial to their survival nonetheless. In this thesis, I explore how beneficiaries and NGO workers use tactics to manage the gaps between policy, practice and need created by state strategy in order to address hardship. I examine the resilience and experiential expertise of beneficiaries and NGO workers as they work around the limitations of state bureaucracy to address high levels of poverty in New Zealand.</p>

The transition to adulthood for autistic young people with additional learning needs: The views and experiences of education professionals in special schools

Educational professionals (n=41) in special schools were interviewed about supporting their autistic pupils transitioning to adulthood following the introduction of the Children and Families Act 2014. Education professionals explained how they lacked the time to fully implement knowledge gained from training, leading to growing reliance on experiential expertise. While our participants reported employing a variety of methods to elicit the voices of pupils, they were uncertain how effective and ethical these were. Further, a lack of available opportunities meant that participants felt they could not always support young people in achieving their goals. Based on these findings, we recommend greater investment in the implementation of staff training, more flexibility for schools to be able to meaningfully elicit and act on pupils’ voices, and better vocational opportunities for autistic young people with additional learning needs. This would enable the principles of the Act, which have been widely lauded, to become a closer reality.

Banal bordering: Everyday encounters between migrants and security officers

The encounter between a migrant and the state is almost always fraught. The power of the state to approve or deny immigration status produces a power imbalance whereby the migrant is subject to the whim of the state. This research extracts encounters between migrants, police, immigration officers, and interpreters in the UK to conceptualise how the minutia of these encounters, and the standardised practices they involve, might impact the ability of migrants to express themselves and exercise their own voice in interactions. Adopting a reflexive ethnographic methodology, and using data gathered with police workers as a pilot case, I consider how the varied objectives of agencies and actors in the migration sector intersect with migrant experiences in practice. Ultimately, implications for migrant security lie in the recognition that migrant voice can be obscured as a result of mundane and everyday procedures. Banal bordering processes can go unnoticed and unaddressed by policy makers, but are often loaded with meaning for migrants subject to them. The vulnerability of migrants and the unbalanced nature of encounters between migrants and the state highlights how state power manifests at an everyday level, suggesting that insecurity is not unique to migrants without documents, but is present in all encounters between migrants and the state. Nevertheless, the professionals who are interacting with migrants are often in a position whereby they have the experiential expertise to offer workable, though limited, solutions, although they do not always have access to the channels or the resources necessary to implement them.

Short report: Autistic parents’ views and experiences of talking about autism with their autistic children

Little is known about how parents talk about autism with their autistic children, particularly among families in which both a parent and child are autistic. Using an online survey, we gathered quantitative and qualitative data from 34 autistic parents (most of whom had told their children about their diagnosis) to address this knowledge gap. There was considerable overlap between the views and experiences of the autistic parents in this study and the largely non-autistic parent samples in previous research. Specifically, parents emphasised the importance of being open and honest about the diagnosis, disclosing the diagnosis as early as possible, individualising discussions to children’s needs and framing the diagnosis positively. There were, however, areas in which the views and experiences of the current sample differed from previous research on non-autistic samples. First, our sample of autistic parents outlined the benefits of their own experiential expertise, which they felt resulted in heightened understanding and empathy with their children. Second, our sample tended not to express concerns about disclosure potentially having a negative impact. Finally, our participants did not express a want or need for professional support with disclosure. Instead, they reported feeling well equipped to support their children using their own knowledge and lived experience. Lay abstract Previous research examining how parents talk about autism with their children has tended to focus on parents who are not autistic themselves. We collected information on this topic from 34 autistic parents of autistic children (most of whom had told their children about their diagnosis). We found similarities, but also differences, between the views and experiences of autistic parents in this research and those reported in previous research (in studies of largely non-autistic parents). Similarities include the following: it is important to be open and honest about the diagnosis; the diagnosis should be introduced/discussed as early as possible; discussions should be tailored to each individual child’s needs; and we should not overlook the challenges associated with autism, but it is important to focus on positive aspects too. Differences include the following: autistic parents used personal experiences in conversations about autism, which was felt to result in increased understanding and empathy with their children; autistic parents overwhelmingly focused on more positive aspects of an autism diagnosis; our sample did not express concerns that discussions could have negative consequences too (e.g. making children more anxious); and autistic parents did not want or need professional support to talk about autism with their children (instead, they felt confident in using their own knowledge/experiences to guide discussions).

Impact of expertise of audit committee chair and nomination committee chair on financial performance of firm

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of financial, monitoring and experiential expertise of audit committee chair (ACC) and HR, monitoring and experiential expertise of nomination committee chair (NCC) on the financial performance (FP) of the firm. Design/methodology/approach Quantitative approach was used in this study to collect data from 50 non-financial firms of Pakistan and to analyze the data through e-views for testing hypotheses. Findings The findings revealed that financial and monitoring expertise of ACC and experiential expertise of NCC positively influence return on assets, return on equity and the net profit margin of the firm. However, no significant influence of experiential expertise of ACC and monitoring and HR expertise of NCC on FP was found. Research limitations/implications The findings of this study will help firms of Pakistan to understand what expertise of their ACC and NCC can contribute to the enhancement of their FP. However, the current study examined the non-financial firms of Pakistan only. Originality/value Past studies have never shown the particular focus on different types of expertise of “Chairs” of nomination and audit committees in a combined research to analyze their impact on FP of firms. The present study has abridged this gap in the field of expertise of chairs of board committees so, it will open new areas of discussion for future researchers in domains of “agency theory”, “human capital theory” and corporate governance.

Empowerment: a key to promote the health of people with disabilities

In France, health public policies for people with disabilities are based on specific laws, recommendations and systems of reference. This population is under the responsibility of the medico-social sector, which governs specialized institutions and services. These services favor a medical approach to health focused on access to care. Their main missions are to take care of disabled people with kindness on a daily basis and to adapt the care to each person’s special needs, whatever the disability. They create links with families, organize the services offered and the living environments, administer their staff and collaborate with health professionals. As they ensure safety and health at all levels, from every individual project to collective life, they have a real opportunity to act on a set of health determinants. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion refers to the empowerment and participation of the population as fundamental principles; this is also true as far as people with disabilities are concerned. With the principal stakeholders on a national level, we wrote a handbook in order to support the implementation of these principles in medico-social institutions and services: ’Promoting health and well-being in the medico-social field in cooperation with people with disabilities” and their families. In this presentation, based on concrete examples, we will outline how the five intervention strategies of the Ottawa Charter can apply to people with disabilities, their families and their communities, especially inside specialized institutions and services. We will pay particular attention to the intervention methods and pedagogical tools which can be used to initiate or to improve the participation of disabled people in decisions, through the valuing of their experiential expertise, the development of their social skills, the strengthening of their health literacy, family-professional co-education, and cooperative strategies. Key messages Specialized institutions and services can promote the health of the people with disabilities they care for, by acting on the determinants of their health and by mobilizing participatory strategies. To strengthen disabled people’s participation, using their experiential expertise, developing their social skills and health literacy, and mobilizing co-education, are the best strategies.