Open minds and closed systems: Comments on the functions and future of the ‘urban’ ‘English‐speaking’ university in South Africa
The paper is in two parts. The first part is a specific critique of Orkin, Nicolaysen and Price''s paper entitled ‘The Future of the Urban University in South Africa’ (Social Dyna‐mics 5(1)). In particular, the critique draws attention to Orkin et aVs failure to understand (1) the complexity of the relationship between poverty, fertility and urbanization, (2) the relationship between economic growth and developmentjunderdevelopment, and (3) the nature of the capitalist mode of production, and, more specifically, how this mode of production has developed within the S. African social formation. The first part of the paper also presents evidence to show how the overall economic condition of the Black working class in South Africa, contrary to widely held beliefs, has deteriorated during the second half of the 1970s. Part 2 of the paper questions many of the ‘liberal’ assumptions about the role and functions of the ‘urban’ ‘English‐speaking’ universities in SA. In particular, it shows that the University's co...
Sociology and its social context: The case of the rise of Marxist sociology in South Africa
This paper, by considering the rise in Marxist sociology in South Africa, challenges the validity of the claim that the university teaching and research of sociology in south Africa furthers the interests of the dominant groups in this society. The paper briefly traces the history of sociology in South Africa and the emergence in the early 1970s of “Marxist” sociology. It is suggested that a wide variety of factors accounts for this development of which the determination by immediate social context is but one. The data indicate that while a great deal of sociology in South Africa is shaped by and supportive of dominant interests, some South African sociology, because of the relative autonomy enjoyed by its practitioners has been shaped by and is supportive of other interests. Marxist sociology constitutes the major variety of this contradictory sociology and its rise and existence illustrate the limits and the complexity of the thesis that thought is existentially determined.
Problems of a centralised department in a decentralised mental hospital.
Abstract This paper deals with some of the issues and problems which arose in a state mental hospital, when in the course of becoming a more community-oriented facility, the hospital decentralized its clinical structure into geographically-based treatment units while retaining a centralized nursing department administration. The effects of unitization and a subsequent attempt to reoganize the nursing department on both the character of professional roles and the integration of parts of the hospital are discussed within the context of an open-systems conceptual model of hospital organization.