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From the perspective of the international scholarly community under North Atlantic domination, South Africa might look like a peripheral place of knowledge production. In recent years, a plethora of voices calling for provincializing Europe, for deconstructing Eurocentrism and for adopting post- and decolonial perspectives have challenged such views. They have partly transformed the academic landscape, but have had limited success in challenging the fundamental global divides in production, circulation and recognition of social scientific knowledge. This book chooses a different take on the question of how North Atlantic domination could be challenged, by conceptualizing counter-hegemonic currents in international sociology. Instead of providing theoretical and deconstructive critiques, counter-hegemonic currents are effective through collective social scientific practice: the production of data, knowledge and texts, of new generations of scholars, the interaction with extra-university actors, leading to the gradual emergence of integrated and productive scientific communities. Their orientation towards local arenas of discussion and production of socially relevant research effectively reduces the belief in the hegemony of the North. The historical development of South African labour studies is a case in point. This study provides a systematic, in-depth analysis of research and teaching activities, networks with extra-academic actors and international cooperation over time in the three major Labour Studies centres: Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. It draws on a rich variety of material, including annual reports of research centres and labour service organizations, teaching contents and exam questions, the 1974-2003 volumes of the “South African Labour Bulletin” and newsletters of ISA Research Committee 44 on Labour Movements. Qualitative analysis of four seminal books is used to assess their contribution to original, general theory-building. In-depth interviews with Labour Studies representatives complement the analysis of documents and literature by reconstructing the oral history of this scholarly community, an indispensable source given that many debates could not appear in written form or had to be watered during the Apartheid years. The study concludes that over time, South African social scientists have generated knowledge on labour, industry and trade unions that is universally comprehensible, but arrogantly local.
Title first published in 2003. In recognition of the power of organised labour, the ANC Government elected in 1994 granted South Africa's unions unprecedented legal and constitutional rights. Despite these gains, the country's unions have faced a fresh set of challenges, many of them emanating from their political allies in Government. From Parliament to the factory floor, South Africa's unions are now confronted with threats as dangerous as those they confronted when organising illegally in the heyday of apartheid. The purpose of this book is to examine how South African unions have responded and how well prepared they are to meet the challenges that confront them in the new millennium.
As the only comprehensive empirical analysis of the changing racial and occupational structure of the urban workforce in South Africa under apartheid, this study will make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the complex inter-relations of past and present racial inequality and economic development in South Africa.
One of the most innovative aspects of South Africa's democratization has been the emergence of institutions and processes through which workers and unions may challenge the state and business to gain varying degrees of control over important economic decisions. These features are unprecedented in the old South Africa. Moreover, such institutions and processes are virtually unknown among developing countries undergoing democratization, and have few precedents among advanced industrial countries that have well-established systems of codetermination. Scholars and practitioners have focused on specific elements of these changes, such as the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) or the workplace forum provisions of the Labour Relations Act. But they have generally missed the fact that the changes have implications ranging from the factory floor to the national and societal level, and the extent to which labor has obtained strong decision-making and consultation rights. Taken together these features have the potential to deepen dramatically the political democracy won in 1994. The chapters in this volume have been written by academics, independent researchers, and researchers affiliated with labor. The contributions combine depth of research and critical appraisal with privileged insights into current policy developments.
In the 1980s there was a surge of trade union power in South Africa. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) was prominent and innovative in this assertion of muscle.Metal that does not Bend traces Numsa’s accumulation, from a few small unions in a handful of factories to the staging of national strikes involving thousands of workers in auto and engineering. It examines how the union used its influence in macroeconomic and political arenas. Numsa was Cosatu’s most radical socialist affiliate, and the book explores its attempts to implement its vision. Historians have framed apartheid’s downfall as resulting from the activities of the exiled liberation movement, global anti-apartheid boycott strategies and internal township insurrection. This book reasserts the critical role of the internal labour movement.