Despite the fact that the commitment to position South Africa as a developmental state has been part of the strategic policy objective for the transformation of the state and governance for some time now, the discourse on the concept is enmeshed in misconceptions. It is distorted and conflated with other concepts. Much of what is bandied about as signifying a developmental state is not consistent with the authoritative scholarship on the conceptualisation of the concept. The discourse largely ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:57:44

South Africa's impoverished settlements have in recent years been increasingly beset by violent protests that are, allegedly, about service delivery. However, the majority of these violent protests have paradoxically occurred exclusively in impoverished settlements where some services were delivered, disrupting the underlying infrastructure and existing services. Thus, the root causes of these violent protests remain contested, with views ranging from those that accept them as services-ba ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:54:33

Public administration studies government functions including the implementation of government policies. It prepares public officials for careers in the public sector. As it is diverse in scope, it aims at advancing management and policies so that the government can function effectively. To better perform their functions, values such as equality, fraternity and democracy need to be inculcated in public officials. It is important to note that Higher Education Institutions need to intervene in t ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:51:17

This article postulates for the quality of Public Administration scholarship. To support this postulation, a discussion on the transformation of higher education is undertaken. Further, an ingemination of scholarship functions is undertaken in an effort to contextualise Public Administration scholarship within the broader understanding of the expectation of what constitutes scholarship. A synthesis of scholarship functions is done to describe what qualities Public Administration scholars shou ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:47:51

South African scholarship, as a result of the colonial and apartheid context within which it developed, is disciplined by a hegemonic discourse formulated by a 'complex' with linked centres of persuasion interior or exterior to its desired true self. This complex spawns hegemonic limitations that are directly related to the inner beings of various scholar communities as they quarry new paths of intellectualism requisite for a democracy such as South Africa. This article examines this ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:44:08

The state of the public sector in South Africa is heavily influenced by particular histories of state administration related to the legacy of apartheid and the nature of the political transition to democracy. We suggest, however, that there is a paucity of scholarly work in the discipline of Public Administration which takes into account this legacy and the manner in which the public sector is embedded in broader social, political and economic relations. This has had significant consequences ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:41:18

Governments have been launching major public sector reforms. Traditional public services are under pressure to transform and seem to be evolving - but into what? In the 1970s one could generally talk of public administration. In the 1980s came the new move to the New Public Management (NPM), and some to Public Administration and Management. Recently some authors have argued that there is a further shift from the NPM to governance. Although public sector reforms are influenced by global preced ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:37:04

The concept of a developmental local government was introduced while debates in Public Administration were in full swing to suit the post-apartheid state. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 necessitated a refinement of the discipline of Public Administration in South Africa. Local government transformation, however, took place after other spheres of government were transformed. It is argued that local government as a vehicle for realisation of envisaged development was und ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:33:35

Public administration scholarship of the 21st century has tended to focus more on recent paradigms of New Public Management (NPM) and its successor paradigm of governance while largely ignoring the strong foundation of century old paradigms of public administration. This approach, if persistently allowed in African universities, will create a serious knowledge deficit among the new crop of African scholars in the discipline of public administration. Where efforts have been made to consider th ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:30:17

This article argues that transforming the humanities is about restoring the curious impulse, depth and purpose of 'the intellectual cause', the uncompromising quest for 'the truth'. In a country like South Africa it is also about the development of a discourse which articulates the 'African condition'; a discourse which African scholars can proudly own as theirs. This has not happened as yet, therefore the debate in the last section of this article is about 'the hu ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:26:01

In the editorialisation of this 2012 March edition of the Journal of Public Administration I could not think of a more appropriate parlance with which to capture the thematic essence of the articles that comprise it than to say the greatness of scholarship is not in the age of a scholar, but in the wit and ingenuity employed to navigate unchartered epistemological grounds. It is in this context that this polemic editorial, nostalgic of the Minnowbrook intellectualism spawned by the complex of ...

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2021-Jun-20 11:22:42