‘Skeptics’ and ‘believers’: anti-trafficking,sex work,and migrant rights activism in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Very little is known about activism, as it relates to the issue of migration in South Africa. Yet, migration policy and migration governance are increasingly becoming important to states like South Africa, which, 22 years into democracy, finds itself being home to the second highest number of migrants in Africa. This paper fills this gap by exploring multi-level policies and advocacy experiences of activists working on migration in a post-colonial context of South Africa through the lens of key contestations around the trafficking discourse in South Africa from 2005 to 2018.     

Race-Making/Race-Mixing: St. Helena and the South Atlantic World

Abstract

This paper focuses on the South Atlantic Oceanic World, and the pivotal place of the Island of St. Helena within that world, as both a context and a conceptual tool for thinking about race-making and race-mixing in South Africa. Drawing on various historical ‘snapshots’ from documentary and archival sources on St. Helena, as well as from exploratory fieldwork in South Africa, St. Helena, an Atlantic World of flux and fluidity, is invoked as a contrast to an Apartheid world that insists upon fixity. These contrasting worlds are the context for thinking about the racial identifications made by St. Helenian immigrants, and their descendants in South Africa. Following Robert Young the paper is interested in ‘counter-active’ constructions of race, which means that the context of race-mixing that this paper invokes is simultaneously a context for race-making.     

Managing Out

ABSTRACT

With the advent of welfare reform and managed care, the nature of managerial practice has increasingly shifted from a primary focus on internal operations to a more external, community focus which involves actively monitoring and managing the boundary between the external environment and internal organizational arrangements. This article explores the boundary spanning aspects of community practice, the related theories of inter-organizational relations, and the process of “managing out” by those in top management and middle management positions in human service organizations.     

Using hybrid models to support the development of organizational evaluation capacity: a case narrative

The ongoing need for public sector organizations to enhance their internal evaluation capacity is increasingly resulting in the use of hybrid evaluation project models, where internal evaluators work with external contracted evaluators to complete evaluative work. This paper first seeks to identify what is currently known about internal evaluation through a synthesis of the literature in this area. It then presents a case narrative illustrating how internal and external evaluation approaches may be used together to strengthen an evaluation project and to develop the evaluation capacity of the organization. Lessons learned include the need to integrate internal and external resources throughout the evaluation and to clarify expectations at the outset of the project.     

The LINC Project

Abstract

The Linking Intergenerational Networks in Communities (LINC) Project, a statewide, collaborative, intergenerational program, funded in 1995 by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, included Clemson University, the Bureau of Senior Services for South Carolina, the South Carolina Department of Education, and the United Way of South Carolina. In this paper, the author focuses on what the partnering groups learned during the five-year project about the process of creating and implementing a collaborative statewide intergenerational program that included a public university, the state offices of aging and education, and a private fundraising and public service agency. The author, who during part of the project was the evaluator at Generations Together at the University of Pittsburgh and who consulted with the LINC project on the project evaluation from 1998 to 2000, uses the literature on collaboration to describe how the four partners worked together to form an intergenerational collaborative organization in South Carolina.     

Building a community-based culture of evaluation

In this article we argue for a community-based approach as a means of promoting a culture of evaluation. We do this by linking two bodies of knowledge – the 70-year theoretical tradition of community-based research and the trans-discipline of program evaluation – that are seldom intersected within the evaluation capacity building literature. We use the three hallmarks of a community-based research approach (community-determined; equitable participation; action and change) as a conceptual lens to reflect on a case example of an evaluation capacity building program led by the Ontario Brian Institute. This program involved two community-based groups (Epilepsy Southwestern Ontarioand the South West Alzheimer Society Alliance) who were supported by evaluators from the Centre for Community Based Research to conduct their own internal evaluation. The article provides an overview of a community-based research approach and its link to evaluation. It then describes the featured evaluation capacity building initiative, including reflections by the participating organizations themselves. We end by discussing lessons learned and their implications for future evaluation capacity building. Our main argument is that organizations that strive towards a community-based approach to evaluation are well placed to build and sustain a culture of evaluation.     

Managing the Trauma of Community Violence and Workplace Accidents in South Africa

Summary

Community violence that spills over to the workplace is substantially impacting the quality of work/life in South Africa. Gold mining is one of the country's leading industries and also one of the most dangerous. Internal and external employee assistance programs are well represented in South Africa and are helping employees deal with the economic and psychological fall-out of community violence and work related accidents.     

“Malicious to the skin” The internalisation of corporal punishment as a teaching and a disciplinary tool among South African teachers

ABSTRACT

Corporal punishment has been legally banned in South Africa. However, anecdotal evidence suggests the prevalence of the practice in schools two decades after this legislative banning. Using the cultural-historical activity theory framework, this article qualitatively explores why teachers continue to use or believe in this method as a disciplinary tool. This study is based on interviews which emanated out of the individual and group interviews of 22 teachers and four retired teachers at a primary school in Mpumalanga province of South Africa. Findings suggest that the internalisation of childhood interpsychological processes related to discipline and experiences of corporal punishment account for the current manifestation of the phenomenon.     

Pathways to becoming an internal evaluator: Perspectives from the Australian non-government sector

There is a lack of clarity around intra-organisational evaluation roles and pathways into these roles in non-government organisations (NGOs). This article presents three auto-narratives from the authors who are working as internal evaluators in the NGO sector. We examine this phenomenon of role ambiguity by exploring our evaluation journeys and struggles to find identities in the formal evaluation community. Findings from the auto-narratives identify implications for the evaluation field regarding professionalisation. This article explores how aspects of professionalisation, such as clarification of roles and tasks of internal evaluators, could facilitate their recruitment, assess credibility and guide career trajectory. Elucidating internal evaluation career pathways contributes to the evaluation discipline by providing information relevant for evaluation capacity building, evaluator training, and the professionalisation movement.     

Reverse interviewing: a white adoptive mother engaging with black birth mothers and vice versa

Abstract

Researcher reflexivity, meaning the revealing of the researcher’s assumptions and her position vis-à-vis those researched, has by now become commonplace. This article explores such issues in the context of a larger study of transnational adoption for which I conducted interviews with South African birth mothers as both a researcher/interviewer and an adoptive mother. Instead of seeking to eliminate researcher bias, I propose using it as data that could reveal novel aspects of the phenomenon under study. This article specifically explores the use of reverse interviewing, which in this case meant disclosing my double positionality and inviting the interviewees to ask me questions. It is not a matter of merely extracting information: the technique allows participants to air their concerns, and facilitates investigation of the researcher’s reactions to them. All this, in turn, carries implications with regard to how the study area is conceptualised.     

Expanding evaluator competency research: Exploring competencies for program evaluation using the context of non-formal education

The overlap of competencies between general program evaluation and specific contexts or content will always be reality because evaluators may need unique competencies to answer evaluation questions for particular contexts or content areas. Limited research exists that explores the essential competencies required by professionals who use evaluation as one part of their job portfolio, which leaves unanswered questions regarding the applicability of current evaluator competency models in such settings. We used a modified three-round Delphi technique to identify evaluator competencies for non-formal educators in Cooperative Extension (CE). Our panelists identified 36 competencies in the non-formal educational programming context for CE educators that they considered important to be included in evaluation capacity building efforts. We categorized our 36 identified competencies from the Delphi study into the five competency domains proposed by the American Evaluation Association. Our findings provide information to help guide professional development among non-formal educators related to program evaluation.     

Social justice,care and developmental welfare in South Africa: a capabilities perspective

One of the paradoxes of the democratic project in South Africa is that the combination of political empowerment, organised constituencies of poor people and increasing social sector spending has made minimal impact on increasing equality. Despite an overall macroeconomic framework that emphasises fiscal restraint, social welfare spending has increased in the past 14 years, and dramatically so since 2003. Almost one in four South Africans receives some or other form of grant, and the majority of recipients are women. Indeed, South Africa is regularly described as the developing world’s largest and most generous welfare state. I address the extent to which gender inequalities are reduced through public sector spending, asking the question: what is the optimal relationship between social policy and the intrinsic democratic goals of equality, social justice and citizenship? Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, the article argues that a focus on social sector spending alone is inadequate to address questions of social justice. Instead, I draw attention to the normative assumptions, discursive environment and institutional context in which social policy is elaborated and implemented. I argue that, in a context in which there is relatively poor infrastructural capacity in the state to ensure that service delivery takes place in fair, consistent and egalitarian ways, households and communities act as shock absorbers of state failures and women’s gendered burdens increase, despite formal commitments to gender equality. While women appear to have gained from political empowerment, women politicians did not effectively leverage their position in the state to promote pro‐poor policies or to build coalitions to challenge the watering down of early commitments to reducing gender inequalities.     

Emancipation or Accommodation? Faith and Justice in a Globalized Africa

Abstract

This article interrogates the meaning of ‘justice’ for religious actors in Africa, comparing the post-independence period to the contemporary one. The treatment and meaning of justice by these actors today differs in important ways from ideas about justice during previous generations’ struggles for freedom. This is because (a) the promise of independence entailed a proactive, emancipatory and pan-African overhaul of oppressive and inegalitarian practices; while justice talk today occurs in a neoliberal context of more reactive and sometimes accommodationist measures to redress problems of violence and poverty; and (b) African leaders and religious thinkers themselves defined the meaning and components of justice in the past, while today much of the discourse around justice emanates from issues identified by transnational nongovernmental organizations and agencies. A neo-Weberian approach helps distill significant characteristics of the complex faith-justice-globalization relationship in these different periods, as well as their imbrication into religiously-plural and syncretic religious contexts.     

Organizational identity,political contexts,and SMO action: Explaining the tactical choices made by peace organizations in Israel,Northern Ireland,and South Africa

Students of social movements have long been interested in the question of why social movement organizations (SMOs) employ the tactics that they do. This paper explores this question by examining twenty-seven SMOs engaged in peace and conflict resolution in Israel, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. While the investigation reveals that SMOs across the sample employed an eclectic mix of tactics to pursue their goals, both cross-region and within-region variations in SMOs' tactical behavior are identified. The paper argues that cross-region variations in tactical behavior are best explained by the political contexts of each region and demonstrates that SMOs' organizational identities best account for within-region variations. Overall, the analysis supports scholars' claims that organizational identities ultimately drive the goals that SMOs pursue, the mix of tactics they emphasize, the degree to which they change their tactics over time, and, most importantly, the extent to which they are willing to engage in extra-institutional modes of action (protest, civil disobedience, violence).     

The Role of Public Relations With Internal Activists

Abstract

Within the context of benefits/outsourcing reviews at a small, Eastern U.S. college, this qualitiative case study examined potential internal activism, employee/organizational leadership communication strategies, and ensuing changes in internal public relations practices/structure. Findings revealed that employees implemented activist strategies in response to perceived communication gaps, prompting organizational leadership to increase solictiation of employee input and commit to ongoing, two-way symmetrical communication; structural changes in internal public relations practices and reporting relationships also resulted. Extending previous activism research findings to internal publics as activists, in this study I suggest that the prodrome of potential employee activism should inform future public relations practice.     

Extended review

The National Liberation Struggle in South Africa. A Case Study of the United Democratic Front, 1983–1987 by Gregory F. Houston. Aldershot: Ashgate. 1999. 299pp. (Available in South Africa in paperback from the Human Sciences Research Council.)

The UDF. A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1883–1991 by Jeremy Seekings. Cape Town: David Philip. 2000. 371pp.

’Beyond our Wildest Dreams’, the United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa by Ineke van Kessel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2000. 367pp.     

Developing Diversity Competence in Child Welfare and Permanency Planning

ABSTRACT

The vision of the pluralistic society of the 1960s relied on the recognition of differences rather than on assimilation. Pluralism held that finally, in America, minorities did not need to melt and adopt the norms of the majority. But the cultural pluralistic perspective has been strongly questioned since the 1990s. Concerns have been raised about whether the alteration of power relations in the United States can be achieved civilly. This article examines the value of long-held assumptions about the common core and explores the desirability of building on it for the next millennium. It moves beyond traditional perspectives of the common core and proposes the notion of a transcul-tural citizen who might be able to move with ease between cultures, whether within the confines of the United States or on a more global level. Illustrations from the United States and abroad are given. Lessons for social work in Europe and America are drawn.     

On the process of combining soft systems methodologies and other approaches in systemic interventions

Abstract

The article explores some issues related to the process of a systemic intervention using our experience in three projects in the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector carried out in South Africa between 1997 and 2002. The projects served as a testing ground for exploring some theoretical and practical aspects associated with the process of facilitating the intervention. The paper presents reflections on some of the lessons learned regarding the process in each of the three cases associated with complex developmental decision-making issues.