Siphelo Ngcwangu | University of Johannesburg, South Africa (original) (raw)
Papers by Siphelo Ngcwangu
International Journal of Educational Development, 2025
This paper explores systems in South Africa to obtain skills needs information from employers, bu... more This paper explores systems in South Africa to obtain skills needs information from employers, build employerengagement, and direct training funds to the training required by employers. We argue that the system is not achieving the key goals for which it was set up. The system is by no means 'employer-led' or 'demand-led'; instead, the system has limited leadership from employers. A complex set of incentives and regulations backfire in some instances, leading to poor data about skills needs. This unwieldy system has many layers of collecting data, leading to information that is not useful for planning purposes, while alienating employers from strategic engagement. The complexity of the tools used to gather data from employers on skills needs undermines the integrity and validity of the data. The link between funding mechanisms to support training and the mechanisms for gathering data on skills needs skews the picture of needs, and does not facilitate provision planning. The complexity of the system deters high-level strategic engagement with employers on the skills trajectory of the sector, and leads to problematic sectoral and national planning. The rules and systems for disbursing funds get in the way of strategic support of provision that meets the needs of employers and of the economy. Poor steering of provision of training is a huge lost opportunity given the existence of a payroll levy with large amounts of money being available for training. In short, this complex attempt to use a regulatory state to steer provision has led to an unwieldy system with many layers of collecting information which is not useful for planning purposes as the primary sources of the data are generally flawed. There are some ways in which, based on our findings, the systems could be improved. But even if this were done, what must be recognised is that employer-engagement is complex, inherently limited, and not the magic bullet for VET relevance often suggested. Our research brings attention to this, together with showing the many ways in which well-intentioned policy has not achieved its goals in this regard.
International Journal of Training Research, 2024
Planning and identifying skills need is mediated by pre-existing social relations and structures ... more Planning and identifying skills need is mediated by pre-existing social relations and structures of power in the society. The South African state has explored various methods, policies, programmes, and systems to understand the skills needs of the country. The uneven success of these different attempts can be explained by understanding the complexity of undergoing the task of identifying skills priorities due to the contested nature of the notion of skill and varying ideas about what ought to be prioritized through these processes. The article has three focus areas: 1) assesses three sets of critiques of skills planning in South Africa; 2) shows why the process of identifying skills needs has become elusive; and 3) discusses two illustrative case studies that show examples of initiatives that are excluded from the skills planning processes but are crucial in understanding experiences of Black youth in marginalized communities in relation to education and skills.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology
This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and re... more This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and reflexivity by drawing on the author's experience of conducting research in a culturally familiar field. The paper is based on in-depth qualitative research that examined the lived realities of unemployed young people residing in the township of Daveyton in South Africa's Gauteng Province. This paper aims to transcend conventional perspectives on 'outsider-insider' dynamics as these do not fully explain the complexity of conducting research in a familiar field. The research involved the use of one-on-one interviews and group discussions. I use the term politics of conducting research in a familiar field to explain the texture, language, and daily realities of Daveyton, which are familiar to me given my upbringing in a similar community that I grew up in. To elaborate on this, I formulate three dimensions of the politics of researching a familiar field which are as follows: (1) Ambiguities of the 'element of surprise'; (2) Renegotiating entry; and (3) wider concept of the researcher as 'outsider'. The paper concludes by calling on researchers conducting studies within their own or similar communities to pay specific attention to the nuances of class privilege, exclusion, and power in order to provide meaningful analysis of the existential conditions that participants face.
Qualitative Sociology Review
This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two... more This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two automotive assembly plants in Pretoria, South Africa. Auto assembly companies are also termed Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Since 1995, South African OEMs have become fully integrated into the global networks of their foreign parent companies. As South Africa’s leading manufacturing sector, the automotive industry’s increasing importance is reflected in its exports, investments, and contribution to the country’s gross domestic product. The two companies are global multinationals situated in one of South Africa’s most globally integrated sectors that have undergone significant mechanization and automation since the 1990s. Therefore, these companies present a relevant site for studying changes in the labor process and the tendencies of deskilling in these workplace environments. The research is based on a qualitative research design that used semi-structured interviews with wor...
Communicare: Journal for Communication Studies in Africa
Strikes and labour issues have caused havoc both locally and globally over the last decade. Socia... more Strikes and labour issues have caused havoc both locally and globally over the last decade. Social dialogue in the form of collective bargaining has not been successful in addressing these issues as labour conflict persists, highlighting the need for improved multi-stakeholder engagement. This paper explores stakeholder engagement from the perspective of collective bargaining in the context of the South African Local Government Bargaining Council (SALGBC). Using an interpretivist paradigm, the research used exploratory, descriptive, and qualitative research to uncover a misalignment between what the SALGBC envisions stakeholder engagement to be and how it is experienced by the relevant parties. Stakeholders in the SALGBC perceive the employer's engagement as conducted in bad faith, coercive, lacking consultation, and accepting industrial action as engagement. To address these, a purposeful multi-stakeholder learning dialogue (PMSLD) is proposed, that blends dialogic communicatio...
Journal of Higher Education in Africa
This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good i... more This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good in South Africa within a bigger project titled ‘Higher Education, Inequalities and the Public Good: Perspectives from Four African Countries’. Qualitative data was collected through key informant interviews by a team of eight researchers who concentrated on specific groups of stakeholders as per the themes of the research. The aim of the interviews was to understand the perceptions of stakeholders both within and outside the university system on the public good role of university education in South Africa. This article focuses on three key issues: locating the research in the context of South Africa’s democratic transition, methodological challenges and pitfalls, tensions, and missing questions/silences. We were doing our research in the aftermath of the student protests of 2015 and 2016, and many of the stakeholders we interviewed were actively involved in making sense of the issues that...
New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy, 2017
South African skills development policy since the promulgation of the Skills Development Act of 1... more South African skills development policy since the promulgation of the Skills Development Act of 1998 has undergone a number of different iterations or attempts at accelerating the quality of provision and the content of training. The writer analyses the proposals to change skills policy for the fourth phase (2020-2025) of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) that have been developed by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).
Handbook of Vocational Education and Training, 2019
overlooked in policy analysis given the dominance of human capital theory assumptions about the r... more overlooked in policy analysis given the dominance of human capital theory assumptions about the relationship between skills and development. The chapter problematizes the binaries of productivism and developmentalism that have come to shape TVET and skills development discourses by arguing for a better understanding of the conceptual questions that shape our approach to these questions. It does so by engaging with different approaches to Amartya Sen's work which derive from a broad range of theoretical traditions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of four limitations of the capabilities approach: (1) influence of the changing character of work; (2) under theorization of power; (3) instrumentalist representation of the notion of functionings; and (4) lack of attention to ways in which VET can reproduce class inequalities.
Journal of Education and Work, 2015
Abstract In South Africa, a national peak structure, the Human Resource Development Council, led ... more Abstract In South Africa, a national peak structure, the Human Resource Development Council, led by the Deputy President and consisting of key Cabinet Ministers, senior leaders from organised labour and business, community representatives, professional bodies and experts from research and higher education, was established to enable high-level coordination at a strategic level. There is little evidence of achievements of this Council and its associated human resource development strategy. This paper suggests that human resource development strategies in South Africa have been more about posturing to be seen to be doing something, than actually planning the development of the skills of the nation, with one brief period when there was a focus on ‘plumbing’ – or dealing with specifically targeted ‘blockages’ in the skills ‘pipeline’. The underlying problem, we suggest, lies in the very notion of national human resource development, which seems on the one hand to be too broad and unwieldy a concept to be useful to governments; on the other hand, it seems to carry too much of the weight of economic development. These conceptual weaknesses, as well as bureaucratic weaknesses in South Africa, explain the poorly conceptualised structures and processes.
Education as Change, 2015
ABSTRACTFrom taking a long-standing position against TVET, the World Bank's most recent educa... more ABSTRACTFrom taking a long-standing position against TVET, the World Bank's most recent education policy has seen a shift to its promotion and then a seeming retraction. The World Bank argues that the occupational route to skills training is the better way to go. The Bank argues that the occupational route rather than general education provides better opportunities for employment in the labour market. The change in opinion – ironically for a bank devoted to market functionality – is a market failure in matching skills to employment opportunities. The World Bank defines the growth of the demand of TVET in many regions as resulting in a need for quality promotion, stronger regulation and allocation of more financial resources towards TVET. Recent academic critiques (Klees, Samoff & Stromquist 2012) of the World Bank's 2020 (hereafter referred WBES 2020; World Bank 2011) strategy have looked at the broad educational focus of the WBES 2020. This article focuses on the Technical and Vocational Education and Tr...
Geoforum, 2010
This article analyzes the recent growth and configuration of Fair Trade networks connecting South... more This article analyzes the recent growth and configuration of Fair Trade networks connecting South African Rooibos tea producers with American consumer markets. As we demonstrate, Fair Trade's growth in the Rooibos sector engages key issues of black empowerment, land reform, and sustainable development in post-Apartheid South Africa. Fair Trade networks provide small-scale black Rooibos producers with critical markets. Most significantly, the Wupperthal and Heiveld cooperatives have upgraded into processing and packaging and their jointly owned Fairpackers facility now exports shelf-ready Rooibos tea. Analyzing the nature of US Fair Trade Rooibos buyers and their South African sourcing arrangements, we identify key variations in Fair Trade commitment and engagement between mission-driven and market-driven distributors. While mission-driven buyers engage small-scale Rooibos cooperatives in multifaceted partnership networks, market-driven buyers pursue conventional sourcing strategies favoring purchases from large plantations and exporters. We conclude that tensions between a radical and commercial orientation toward Fair Trade in Rooibos tea networks in many ways mirror those in the broader movement.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY, 2023
This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and re... more This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and reflexivity by drawing on the author's experience of conducting research in a culturally familiar field. The paper is based on in-depth qualitative research that examined the lived realities of unemployed young people residing in the township of Daveyton in South Africa's Gauteng Province. This paper aims to transcend conventional perspectives on 'outsider-insider' dynamics as these do not fully explain the complexity of conducting research in a familiar field. The research involved the use of one-on-one interviews and group discussions. I use the term politics of conducting research in a familiar field to explain the texture, language, and daily realities of Daveyton, which are familiar to me given my upbringing in a similar community that I grew up in. To elaborate on this, I formulate three dimensions of the politics of researching a familiar field which are as follows: (1) Ambiguities of the 'element of surprise'; (2) Renegotiating entry; and (3) wider concept of the researcher as 'outsider'. The paper concludes by calling on researchers conducting studies within their own or similar communities to pay specific attention to the nuances of class privilege, exclusion, and power in order to provide meaningful analysis of the existential conditions that participants face.
Qualitative Sociology Review , 2023
This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two... more This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two automotive assembly plants in Pretoria, South Africa. Auto assembly companies are also termed Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Since 1995, South African OEMs have become
Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 2022
This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good i... more This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good in South Africa within a bigger project titled 'Higher Education, Inequalities and the Public Good: Perspectives from Four African Countries'. Qualitative data was collected through key informant interviews by a team of eight researchers who concentrated on specific groups of stakeholders as per the themes of the research. The aim of the interviews was to understand the perceptions of stakeholders both within and outside the university system on the public good role of university education in South Africa. This article focuses on three key issues: locating the research in the context of South Africa's democratic transition, methodological challenges and pitfalls, tensions, and missing questions/silences. We were doing our research in the aftermath of the student protests of 2015 and 2016, and many of the stakeholders we interviewed were actively involved in making sense of the issues that the students raised. The research team formulated the 'DNA' framework for analysing qualitative data from the stakeholders, which refers to the descriptive, normative and analytic aspects of the data that pointed to a unique way in which we could frame our findings. By reflecting on the research process and our positionality in it, the paper contributes to the general field of qualitative research studies, bringing in the dynamics of conducting research in large-scale cross-national projects.
South African Journal of Higher Education, 2016
The concept of 'scarce skills' features prominently in South Africa's national development discou... more The concept of 'scarce skills' features prominently in South Africa's national development discourse. Over the past decade, the 'scarce skills' concept has been used to frame debate about the relationship between post-school education and training and the economy. In this article, we compare education policy documents articulating 'scarce skills' perspectives with plans from four occupational sectors and general labour market data and analysis. In our analysis, we identify ideological, theoretical, conceptual and methodological limitations to the 'scarce skills' discourse. Each limitation contributes to a reduced and myopic understanding of the complex and dynamic relationship between post-school education and the economy. We conclude by sharing three arguments which post-school institutions could draw on to respond to the skills discourse.
Journal of Fair Trade, 2021
The notion of Fair Trade is a unique idea conceptualised historically in Northern countries to ad... more The notion of Fair Trade is a unique idea conceptualised historically in Northern countries to advance equitable and just trading processes that could provide an alternative to the mainstream trading system in the world. Northern activists working with producers, labourers and other impoverished sectors of the Global South are using market-based strategies to mobilise consumer awareness in order to bolster incomes and empower Southern producers and workers (Murray & Raynolds, 2007, p. 4). Fair Trade as a system is seen as a progressive attempt to transform the global exchange of products in a way that ensures ethical and socially just methods of production. Barrientos, Conroy and Jones (2007, p. 54) point out that in the United States Fair Trade's dramatic growth has accentuated underlying differences in the movement and tensions between the movement-based Alternative Trade Organisations (ATO)-led Fair Trade, and certified Fair Trade in mainstream outlets. The limits of the proj...
International Journal of Educational Development, 2025
This paper explores systems in South Africa to obtain skills needs information from employers, bu... more This paper explores systems in South Africa to obtain skills needs information from employers, build employerengagement, and direct training funds to the training required by employers. We argue that the system is not achieving the key goals for which it was set up. The system is by no means 'employer-led' or 'demand-led'; instead, the system has limited leadership from employers. A complex set of incentives and regulations backfire in some instances, leading to poor data about skills needs. This unwieldy system has many layers of collecting data, leading to information that is not useful for planning purposes, while alienating employers from strategic engagement. The complexity of the tools used to gather data from employers on skills needs undermines the integrity and validity of the data. The link between funding mechanisms to support training and the mechanisms for gathering data on skills needs skews the picture of needs, and does not facilitate provision planning. The complexity of the system deters high-level strategic engagement with employers on the skills trajectory of the sector, and leads to problematic sectoral and national planning. The rules and systems for disbursing funds get in the way of strategic support of provision that meets the needs of employers and of the economy. Poor steering of provision of training is a huge lost opportunity given the existence of a payroll levy with large amounts of money being available for training. In short, this complex attempt to use a regulatory state to steer provision has led to an unwieldy system with many layers of collecting information which is not useful for planning purposes as the primary sources of the data are generally flawed. There are some ways in which, based on our findings, the systems could be improved. But even if this were done, what must be recognised is that employer-engagement is complex, inherently limited, and not the magic bullet for VET relevance often suggested. Our research brings attention to this, together with showing the many ways in which well-intentioned policy has not achieved its goals in this regard.
International Journal of Training Research, 2024
Planning and identifying skills need is mediated by pre-existing social relations and structures ... more Planning and identifying skills need is mediated by pre-existing social relations and structures of power in the society. The South African state has explored various methods, policies, programmes, and systems to understand the skills needs of the country. The uneven success of these different attempts can be explained by understanding the complexity of undergoing the task of identifying skills priorities due to the contested nature of the notion of skill and varying ideas about what ought to be prioritized through these processes. The article has three focus areas: 1) assesses three sets of critiques of skills planning in South Africa; 2) shows why the process of identifying skills needs has become elusive; and 3) discusses two illustrative case studies that show examples of initiatives that are excluded from the skills planning processes but are crucial in understanding experiences of Black youth in marginalized communities in relation to education and skills.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology
This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and re... more This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and reflexivity by drawing on the author's experience of conducting research in a culturally familiar field. The paper is based on in-depth qualitative research that examined the lived realities of unemployed young people residing in the township of Daveyton in South Africa's Gauteng Province. This paper aims to transcend conventional perspectives on 'outsider-insider' dynamics as these do not fully explain the complexity of conducting research in a familiar field. The research involved the use of one-on-one interviews and group discussions. I use the term politics of conducting research in a familiar field to explain the texture, language, and daily realities of Daveyton, which are familiar to me given my upbringing in a similar community that I grew up in. To elaborate on this, I formulate three dimensions of the politics of researching a familiar field which are as follows: (1) Ambiguities of the 'element of surprise'; (2) Renegotiating entry; and (3) wider concept of the researcher as 'outsider'. The paper concludes by calling on researchers conducting studies within their own or similar communities to pay specific attention to the nuances of class privilege, exclusion, and power in order to provide meaningful analysis of the existential conditions that participants face.
Qualitative Sociology Review
This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two... more This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two automotive assembly plants in Pretoria, South Africa. Auto assembly companies are also termed Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Since 1995, South African OEMs have become fully integrated into the global networks of their foreign parent companies. As South Africa’s leading manufacturing sector, the automotive industry’s increasing importance is reflected in its exports, investments, and contribution to the country’s gross domestic product. The two companies are global multinationals situated in one of South Africa’s most globally integrated sectors that have undergone significant mechanization and automation since the 1990s. Therefore, these companies present a relevant site for studying changes in the labor process and the tendencies of deskilling in these workplace environments. The research is based on a qualitative research design that used semi-structured interviews with wor...
Communicare: Journal for Communication Studies in Africa
Strikes and labour issues have caused havoc both locally and globally over the last decade. Socia... more Strikes and labour issues have caused havoc both locally and globally over the last decade. Social dialogue in the form of collective bargaining has not been successful in addressing these issues as labour conflict persists, highlighting the need for improved multi-stakeholder engagement. This paper explores stakeholder engagement from the perspective of collective bargaining in the context of the South African Local Government Bargaining Council (SALGBC). Using an interpretivist paradigm, the research used exploratory, descriptive, and qualitative research to uncover a misalignment between what the SALGBC envisions stakeholder engagement to be and how it is experienced by the relevant parties. Stakeholders in the SALGBC perceive the employer's engagement as conducted in bad faith, coercive, lacking consultation, and accepting industrial action as engagement. To address these, a purposeful multi-stakeholder learning dialogue (PMSLD) is proposed, that blends dialogic communicatio...
Journal of Higher Education in Africa
This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good i... more This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good in South Africa within a bigger project titled ‘Higher Education, Inequalities and the Public Good: Perspectives from Four African Countries’. Qualitative data was collected through key informant interviews by a team of eight researchers who concentrated on specific groups of stakeholders as per the themes of the research. The aim of the interviews was to understand the perceptions of stakeholders both within and outside the university system on the public good role of university education in South Africa. This article focuses on three key issues: locating the research in the context of South Africa’s democratic transition, methodological challenges and pitfalls, tensions, and missing questions/silences. We were doing our research in the aftermath of the student protests of 2015 and 2016, and many of the stakeholders we interviewed were actively involved in making sense of the issues that...
New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy, 2017
South African skills development policy since the promulgation of the Skills Development Act of 1... more South African skills development policy since the promulgation of the Skills Development Act of 1998 has undergone a number of different iterations or attempts at accelerating the quality of provision and the content of training. The writer analyses the proposals to change skills policy for the fourth phase (2020-2025) of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) that have been developed by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).
Handbook of Vocational Education and Training, 2019
overlooked in policy analysis given the dominance of human capital theory assumptions about the r... more overlooked in policy analysis given the dominance of human capital theory assumptions about the relationship between skills and development. The chapter problematizes the binaries of productivism and developmentalism that have come to shape TVET and skills development discourses by arguing for a better understanding of the conceptual questions that shape our approach to these questions. It does so by engaging with different approaches to Amartya Sen's work which derive from a broad range of theoretical traditions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of four limitations of the capabilities approach: (1) influence of the changing character of work; (2) under theorization of power; (3) instrumentalist representation of the notion of functionings; and (4) lack of attention to ways in which VET can reproduce class inequalities.
Journal of Education and Work, 2015
Abstract In South Africa, a national peak structure, the Human Resource Development Council, led ... more Abstract In South Africa, a national peak structure, the Human Resource Development Council, led by the Deputy President and consisting of key Cabinet Ministers, senior leaders from organised labour and business, community representatives, professional bodies and experts from research and higher education, was established to enable high-level coordination at a strategic level. There is little evidence of achievements of this Council and its associated human resource development strategy. This paper suggests that human resource development strategies in South Africa have been more about posturing to be seen to be doing something, than actually planning the development of the skills of the nation, with one brief period when there was a focus on ‘plumbing’ – or dealing with specifically targeted ‘blockages’ in the skills ‘pipeline’. The underlying problem, we suggest, lies in the very notion of national human resource development, which seems on the one hand to be too broad and unwieldy a concept to be useful to governments; on the other hand, it seems to carry too much of the weight of economic development. These conceptual weaknesses, as well as bureaucratic weaknesses in South Africa, explain the poorly conceptualised structures and processes.
Education as Change, 2015
ABSTRACTFrom taking a long-standing position against TVET, the World Bank's most recent educa... more ABSTRACTFrom taking a long-standing position against TVET, the World Bank's most recent education policy has seen a shift to its promotion and then a seeming retraction. The World Bank argues that the occupational route to skills training is the better way to go. The Bank argues that the occupational route rather than general education provides better opportunities for employment in the labour market. The change in opinion – ironically for a bank devoted to market functionality – is a market failure in matching skills to employment opportunities. The World Bank defines the growth of the demand of TVET in many regions as resulting in a need for quality promotion, stronger regulation and allocation of more financial resources towards TVET. Recent academic critiques (Klees, Samoff & Stromquist 2012) of the World Bank's 2020 (hereafter referred WBES 2020; World Bank 2011) strategy have looked at the broad educational focus of the WBES 2020. This article focuses on the Technical and Vocational Education and Tr...
Geoforum, 2010
This article analyzes the recent growth and configuration of Fair Trade networks connecting South... more This article analyzes the recent growth and configuration of Fair Trade networks connecting South African Rooibos tea producers with American consumer markets. As we demonstrate, Fair Trade's growth in the Rooibos sector engages key issues of black empowerment, land reform, and sustainable development in post-Apartheid South Africa. Fair Trade networks provide small-scale black Rooibos producers with critical markets. Most significantly, the Wupperthal and Heiveld cooperatives have upgraded into processing and packaging and their jointly owned Fairpackers facility now exports shelf-ready Rooibos tea. Analyzing the nature of US Fair Trade Rooibos buyers and their South African sourcing arrangements, we identify key variations in Fair Trade commitment and engagement between mission-driven and market-driven distributors. While mission-driven buyers engage small-scale Rooibos cooperatives in multifaceted partnership networks, market-driven buyers pursue conventional sourcing strategies favoring purchases from large plantations and exporters. We conclude that tensions between a radical and commercial orientation toward Fair Trade in Rooibos tea networks in many ways mirror those in the broader movement.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY, 2023
This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and re... more This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and reflexivity by drawing on the author's experience of conducting research in a culturally familiar field. The paper is based on in-depth qualitative research that examined the lived realities of unemployed young people residing in the township of Daveyton in South Africa's Gauteng Province. This paper aims to transcend conventional perspectives on 'outsider-insider' dynamics as these do not fully explain the complexity of conducting research in a familiar field. The research involved the use of one-on-one interviews and group discussions. I use the term politics of conducting research in a familiar field to explain the texture, language, and daily realities of Daveyton, which are familiar to me given my upbringing in a similar community that I grew up in. To elaborate on this, I formulate three dimensions of the politics of researching a familiar field which are as follows: (1) Ambiguities of the 'element of surprise'; (2) Renegotiating entry; and (3) wider concept of the researcher as 'outsider'. The paper concludes by calling on researchers conducting studies within their own or similar communities to pay specific attention to the nuances of class privilege, exclusion, and power in order to provide meaningful analysis of the existential conditions that participants face.
Qualitative Sociology Review , 2023
This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two... more This article presents research on skills development and workplace change complexities within two automotive assembly plants in Pretoria, South Africa. Auto assembly companies are also termed Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Since 1995, South African OEMs have become
Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 2022
This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good i... more This article discusses the experience of doing research on higher education and the public good in South Africa within a bigger project titled 'Higher Education, Inequalities and the Public Good: Perspectives from Four African Countries'. Qualitative data was collected through key informant interviews by a team of eight researchers who concentrated on specific groups of stakeholders as per the themes of the research. The aim of the interviews was to understand the perceptions of stakeholders both within and outside the university system on the public good role of university education in South Africa. This article focuses on three key issues: locating the research in the context of South Africa's democratic transition, methodological challenges and pitfalls, tensions, and missing questions/silences. We were doing our research in the aftermath of the student protests of 2015 and 2016, and many of the stakeholders we interviewed were actively involved in making sense of the issues that the students raised. The research team formulated the 'DNA' framework for analysing qualitative data from the stakeholders, which refers to the descriptive, normative and analytic aspects of the data that pointed to a unique way in which we could frame our findings. By reflecting on the research process and our positionality in it, the paper contributes to the general field of qualitative research studies, bringing in the dynamics of conducting research in large-scale cross-national projects.
South African Journal of Higher Education, 2016
The concept of 'scarce skills' features prominently in South Africa's national development discou... more The concept of 'scarce skills' features prominently in South Africa's national development discourse. Over the past decade, the 'scarce skills' concept has been used to frame debate about the relationship between post-school education and training and the economy. In this article, we compare education policy documents articulating 'scarce skills' perspectives with plans from four occupational sectors and general labour market data and analysis. In our analysis, we identify ideological, theoretical, conceptual and methodological limitations to the 'scarce skills' discourse. Each limitation contributes to a reduced and myopic understanding of the complex and dynamic relationship between post-school education and the economy. We conclude by sharing three arguments which post-school institutions could draw on to respond to the skills discourse.
Journal of Fair Trade, 2021
The notion of Fair Trade is a unique idea conceptualised historically in Northern countries to ad... more The notion of Fair Trade is a unique idea conceptualised historically in Northern countries to advance equitable and just trading processes that could provide an alternative to the mainstream trading system in the world. Northern activists working with producers, labourers and other impoverished sectors of the Global South are using market-based strategies to mobilise consumer awareness in order to bolster incomes and empower Southern producers and workers (Murray & Raynolds, 2007, p. 4). Fair Trade as a system is seen as a progressive attempt to transform the global exchange of products in a way that ensures ethical and socially just methods of production. Barrientos, Conroy and Jones (2007, p. 54) point out that in the United States Fair Trade's dramatic growth has accentuated underlying differences in the movement and tensions between the movement-based Alternative Trade Organisations (ATO)-led Fair Trade, and certified Fair Trade in mainstream outlets. The limits of the proj...
UNIVERSITIES, SOCIETY AND DEVELOPMENT: African Perspectives of University Community Engagement in Secondary Cities, Editors Samuel N. Fongwa Thierry M. Luescher Ntimi N. Mtawa & Jesmael Mataga , 2022
The notion of a social compact in South Africa is generally associated with attempts by the post-... more The notion of a social compact in South Africa is generally associated with attempts by the post-apartheid state to reconcile the goals of political democratisation and economic development. The usage of the social compact idea has seen the term creeping into the vocabulary of development in South Africa. As part of the social compact, the state has made broader concessions in improving the prospects of students from poor and lower-middle-class backgrounds to enter universities. Such concessions range from increases to financial aid, directing more resources to student accommodation and enabling more students from historically disadvantaged groups to access university. These challenges put into focus the need for higher education scholars to build a more robust understanding of what is meant by a social compact, its evolution and relevance in addressing the variety of challenges that confront higher education in South Africa.
Liberation Diairies: Reflections on 20 years of Democracy, Edited by Busani Ngcaweni, 2014