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Copyright of Current Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The post-apartheid state in South Africa inherited a care regime that historically combined liberal, social democratic and conservative features. The post-apartheid state has sought to deracialise the care regime, through extending to the African majority the privileges that hitherto had been largely confined to the white minority, and to transform it, to render it more appropriate to the needs and norms of the African majority. Deracialisation proved insufficient and transformation too limited to address inequalities in access to care. Reform also generated tensions, including between a predominant ideology that accords women and children rights as autonomous individuals, the widespread belief in kinship obligations and an enduring if less widespread conservative, patriarchal ideology. Ordinary people must navigate between the market (if they can afford it), the state and the family, balancing opportunities for independence with the claims made on and by kin. The care regime thus remains a contested hybrid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse civic policing in post-apartheid South Africa as a form of 'weaponized volunteering'. We use 'weaponized volunteerism' as a conceptual lens to refer to practices that rest on the potentiality and/or willingness to use physical violence or to harness the physical violence of others under the guise of 'volunteer work'. By drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted by both authors in eThekwini, South Africa, we show that by framing civic policing as weaponized volunteerism, we are able to analyse the violence at the core of policing and underline the varied ways that violence work is harnessed and expanded through civic policing, in the interest of civic and state actors. This, in turn, allows us to explore the continuum between state and civic violence, which is often directed towards similar groups and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the 2015 student mobilizations in South Africa (SA), which arose in opposition to a 10% hike in tuition fees planned for 2016 at the University of Witwatersrand (WITS) and spurred a massive student reaction across all the universities of the country. After only 10 days of mobilization, the protest, also known as #FeesMustFall by virtue of the most popular Twitter hashtag associated with it, succeeded in halting the hike. How and why did the protesters win? To answer this question, this study combined various qualitative methods of analysis. The author carried out in-depth interviews with all the relevant actors involved in the issue, and analysed documents relating to the movement elaborated by the students in the year of the protest (2015), as well as the main policy documents on higher education in post-apartheid South Africa (1994–2016) released by the government. The author argues that massive and disruptive student protests play a crucial role in 'young' democracies, as is the case of today's South Africa, in which higher education is still considered an important societal issue, and university-level students a legitimate political actor. Where students are perceived as a legitimate element of the political system, it is more likely for them to have an impact on society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-term analytical view of Indian migration and their human rights experiences in South Africa is essential to understand what prompts continued Indian migration and the factors that shape migrants’ human security experiences. The intersections of global, social, political and economic powers combine with national and international forces to determine the experiences of migration and human (in)security among Indian migrants in South Africa. This article focuses on historical Indian indentured migrants and the continued post-apartheid contemporary migration of Indians to South Africa. Throughout South Africa’s turbulent, violent and exploitative history, the political constructs of slavery, colonialism, economic expansionism, economic dispossession and apartheid convened in the passage of poor men, women and children from the Indian subcontinent. The article argues that traces of earlier exploitative histories continue to shape the framework for present-day Indian migrants in a way that impacts directly on their human security within a contemporary context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author explores the role of religion in social constructions of heterosexual masculinity in South Africa in the context of civil society driven programs to fight sexual and gender-based violence and the spread of HIV. Critically engaging with the concept of hegemonic masculinity and the sociological literature on gender relations in conservative Christian communities, the author examines how Charismatic Christian and Pentecostal communities in the townships of Cape Town negotiate their model of masculinity and gender authority in the context of the prevailing hegemonies of ‘traditional’ and ‘liberal’ masculinity. Based on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with Pentecostal men, the author specifies the concrete mechanisms whereby Pentecostalism both contributes to transform but also to reproduce rather than undermine hegemonic masculinity. He finds that Pentecostalism responsibilizes men not because men adopt its sexual ideology but because they adopt its model of personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the high levels of collective violence associated with contentious politics in South Africa as a prism through which to explore the confrontation between a sociology of the West, represented by Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, and a sociology of the colonial and postcolonial South, represented by Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence. The article analyses cases of strike violence, community protests, vigilante violence and xenophobic attacks. It shows that collective violence has both emancipatory and corrosive dimensions, that the state cannot monopolise either symbolic or physical violence, that subalterns shape symbolic order from below in a process which may draw on the symbolic charge of collective violence, that subaltern collective violence is embedded in its own moral orders which challenge the symbolic authority of the law, and that subaltern democratic organisation may provide an alternative avenue for empowering the subordinated that neither Bourdieu nor Fanon considered. The article concludes that the interplay between symbolic and physical violence suggests not the separation of a sociology of the South from a sociology of the West, but an interplay between them, a sociology that brings Bourdieu and Fanon into play with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology has been a subject of extensive debate in South Africa, especially over the last two decades. Central to the debate on sociology as a discipline and practice were efforts to document its history and paradigmatic shifts that characterized it, as well as topical themes that defined its research. One key observation in its evolution pointed to a historical shift from being a service discipline to the previous racially segregatory political regimes, especially between the early 1900s and 1960s, to a multi-paradigm discipline that challenged the racial order and inequalities in the 1970s onwards. This period marked the height of public sociology. Recent observations, however, especially in the post-apartheid period, projected a scenario of the discipline in a state of decline. Counter-evidence was nevertheless also presented suggesting not only the renewal of sociology in South Africa but also its active interest and involvement in the struggle against inequalities as part of the voices of the poor. This article calls these observations as the decline thesis and the renewal thesis, and contrasts them. The latter, I argue, is more compelling than the former. Notwithstanding this, the article argues however that the extent to which sociology in involved in struggles against inequalities is under question since public sociology, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, is underdeveloped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The end of apartheid in South Africa has not led to widespread racial desegregation and racial integration. Racial segregation and antipathy appear to have deep and enduring roots. There has been some racial desegregation in middle-class or elite neighbourhoods, due to the rapid upward mobility of some ‘African’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’ people, but very little racial desegregation across most of the country. This article examines exceptional cases of racial desegregation and racial integration in low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town, where mixes of coloured and African people have been allocated new public housing. Because residents of these neighbourhoods did not choose to live in racially-integrated areas, the study of their evolving inter-racial interactions helps us to understand anew the possibility of transcending racial division in a society like South Africa. The article finds that residents of these neighbourhoods retain a highly racialized discourse and subscribe to some racial stereotypes. At the same time, however, a variety of positive inter-racial interactions occur, and friendships form, beyond people’s expectations. The dominant culture is a racialized but tolerant multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Current Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article argues that white officials m black trade unions in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s were rebels with numerous causes. These causes were to help build a democratic and powerful black trade union movement, to work towards social and economic justice, and to secure their own long-term future in South Africa. The argument is based on presenting a historical overview of the two major black trade union federations that emerged in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. One was non-racial and accepted white intellectuals as officials. It eventually grew into COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which played a major role in the mass democratic movement during the transition to democracy in 1994. The other black trade union federation was Africanist with some black consciousness orientations and appointed only blacks as officials. It eventually grew into NACTU, the National Council of Trade Unions. It never matched COSATU in size, strength or strategic leadership. The non-racial federation grew much stronger than the Africanist federation by focusing on building active democratic shop steward structures in the workplace. This was part of a deliberate strategy by white intellectuals in the unions to put control of the unions into the hands of black workers, who gradually rose through the ranks into positions of leadership. They and other black intellectuals replaced the white intellectuals in the unions who could then proceed to serve their country in other ways. One of them, Alec Erwin, is presently a minister in President Mbeki's cabinet. Far from having been rebels without a cause, white intellectuals in black unions had the privilege of working towards political reconciliation as well as the search for social and economic justice in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Current Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During the past two decades, governments in major industrialized countries have sought to restructure public sector agencies on broadly corporate lines. In applying the private sector solution to the public sector problem, new managerial practices were introduced into public sector agencies, including police organizations. These reforms were implemented with a view to restructuring and changing the internal culture of organization increasing operational performance, efficiency and cooperation and came to inform public and police administration in most English-speaking countries. Attempts to reform police agencies have given significant weight to transforming management and work structures and have had considerable implications for workplace relations; albeit in different contexts. Both police managers and their employee representative bodies have exhibited a traditional resistance to police organizational change and this includes attempts to democratize police organizations both in terms of their internal structuring and their external public interface. As a result there has been a renewed emphasis on performance monitoring, cost effectiveness and administrative accountability.

There is no doubt that even with greater numbers of women in the ranks and their proven capabilities that the military remains one of the most prototypically masculine of all social institutions. The reasons for this are diverse: to an extent they are historic, as for centuries men have been viewed as the protectors, women the protected and compassionate, and for fear of women's safety in the hands of captives; but largely, the motivations stem from the concern regarding effects that the expanded utilization of women within the ranks may have on "operational effectiveness." There are numerous positions on women in the armed forces, with little consensus among both feminists and those within the armed forces as to whether women should serve in the armed forces, and/or in what capacities. These positions are to a large extent influenced by military, societal and cultural factors dominant in the larger society as well as uniquely female concerns relating to the biology of women and their child-rearing responsibilities. South Africa provides an interesting case study in many respects. Legally, in the wake of constitutional reforms the South African National Defence Force has had no option but to acknowledge the right of women to serve in "all" ranks and positions, including combat roles. At the same time, it is a country with vast inequalities in race and class, which brings a new dimension to gender integration beyond that of "equality of rights" commonly associated with the European debates.

The article focuses on the ongoing struggle between the professions of pharmacy and medicine on the right to diagnose, prescribe and administer medical treatment. Pharmacy and medicine have been inextricably intertwined from the beginnings of history. They were, in all practicality, one and the same profession. It was only as scientific knowledge increased that the tasks allotted to each began to diverge, and so it became logical to separate medicine and pharmacy into two independent professions. Sometimes between 1231 and 1240, Frederick II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, issued an edict to establish pharmacy as a distinct and separate profession, wholly independent from medicine. Although the edict applied only to a portion of the empire, in the ensuing years the concept spread and became firmly entrenched throughout continental Europe. In Great Britain, however, modern pharmacy has other roots. The aim of this article is to explore the conflict between pharmacists' pursuit to extend their discretionary powers to prescribe and doctors' quest to engage in dispensing of medications. Adopting a global perspective, the article analyses issues such as occupational task boundaries, dominance, jurisdiction and autonomy of the professions. It also contemplates the role of the state in relation to these issues in the current South African transitionary context.

This article explores coloured identity formation as revealed through an extract from the life history of one woman and the researcher's reflections on dynamics of the research encounter. It traces the narrator's recognition of herself as coloured through her experience of racial violence as well as such recognition, on the part of both narrator and researcher, through the pleasures of the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the state of race relations and the chances of nation-building in the new South Africa. In the 1960s, modernization theory argued that modernity would inevitably weaken particularistic, ascriptive ties of kinship and ethnicity and replace them with more inclusive, universalistic identification grounded in principles of common citizenship. Social scientists differ widely on the relationship between nationalism and racism. Social scientists Benedict Anderson defends the self-sacrificing love that nationalism inspires against the critics who stress the pathological character of official nationalism. He disagrees with social scientist Tom Nairn whom he considers basically mistaken in arguing that racism and anti-semitism derive from nationalism. In South Africa, controversy revolves around the question of whether the country should strive to be a united political community that transcends racial and ethnic awareness, or whether it should recognize itself as a multiracial nation-state that acknowledges and embraces the ethnic and racial diversity, but runs the risk that diversity could threaten the stability and unity of the new state.