The significance of the local trade in natural resource products for livelihoods and poverty alleviation in South Africa
- Authors: Shackleton, Sheona E
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: Poverty -- South Africa Rural poor -- South Africa Natural resources -- South Africa Selling -- Handicraft South Africa -- Commerce
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:4776 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1011731
- Description: What role can the commercialisation of natural resource products play in the efforts to reduce poverty and vulnerability and how can this be enhanced? With poverty alleviation at the top of the global development agenda, this is a question posed by many scholars, practitioners, donor agencies and government departments operating at the environment-development interface. However, recent commentary on this issue is mixed and ambiguous, with some observers being quite optimistic regarding the potential of these products, while others hold a counter view. This thesis explores the livelihood contributions and poverty alleviation potential of four products traded locally in the Bushbuckridge municipality, South Africa; namely traditional brooms, reed mats, woodcraft and a beer made from the fruits of Sclerocarya birrea. A common approach, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, was used to investigate the harvesting, processing and marketing arrangements, sustainability and livelihood contributions of each product. The results illustrate that any inference regarding the potential of the trade to alleviate poverty depends on how poverty is defined and interpreted, and on whether the role of these products is assessed from a holistic livelihood perspective that includes notions of vulnerability, alternatives and choice, diversification and the needs of rural producers themselves. Overall, the products studied were key in enhancing the livelihood security of the poorest members of society, forming an important safety net and assisting in raising household incomes to levels equivalent to the wider population, but generally were unlikely, on their own, to provide a route out of poverty. However, there were notable exceptions, with marked variation evident both within and across products. Incomes often surpassed local wage rates, and a minority of producers were obtaining returns equivalent to or greater than the official minimum wage. Other benefits, such as the opportunity to work from home or to diversify the livelihood portfolio, were also crucial, with the trade representing different livelihood strategies for different households. When viewed within the context of rising unemployment and HIV/AIDS these findings assume greater significance. While the trades were complex and growth limited, livelihood benefits could be improved on a sustainable basis if the sector was given the attention and support it deserves.
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- Date Issued: 2006
Towards theorizing human resource development in South Africa: a critical analysis and the development of a tool to facilitate improved understanding and practice
- Authors: Anderson, Amber Cristal
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: Manpower planning -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , DPhil
- Identifier: vital:16130 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/469 , Manpower planning -- South Africa
- Description: The primary objective of this study is to generate pathways to understanding Human Resources Development (HRD) by developing a tool which enables and enhances a shared and common understanding of HRD in South Africa (SA). To achieve this objective, this research explores the nature and importance of HRD and articulates and aggregates these thoughts and practices into a tool which facilitates an understanding of HRD with the overarching aim of improving HRD thoughts and practices in South Africa. While there is substantial international and local literature on HRD, the existing body of research on the nature and importance of HRD in South Africa is skeletal. National HRD concepts and practices are fragmented, and are as diverse as the number of stakeholders and partners that it serves. In addition, theory-building in HRD is disconnected and removed from practice. In order to address this problem, a qualitative, interpretive, theory-building social constructionist research strategy was embarked upon. The research strategy was executed in an iterative, cyclical manner, using theoretical sampling and content analysis rigorously executed within a coding paradigm informed by open, axial and selective coding techniques with local and international literature and informal reviews as the units of analysis. Qualitative and quantitative findings of the South African Qualifications Authority ground-breaking, world-first longitudinal study was analyzed and used to find relevance and corroborate the international literature available on HRD. Informal reviews were conducted with 7 human resources (HR) practitioners and 54 internationally-based HR colleagues of the researcher in order to ensure as appropriate a degree of integration between theory and practice as was possible. This process culminated in the most significant contribution of this research, which is a tool consisting of six pathways, that facilitates an understanding of the nature and importance of HRD in South Africa. The development of the tool enabled the articulation and aggregation of a thorough and coherent description, explanation and representation of HRD. The research highlights the need for HRD scholars and practitioners to channel their energies and effort on all the catalytic aspects of organizational life, namely uniqueness, social complexity, knowledge, and path dependency, by acquiring critical insight into the profound value of HRD which will allow the realization and sustainability of competitive advantage in a rich and dynamic global economy.
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- Date Issued: 2006
Using experiential learning to facilitate pharmacy students' understanding of patients' medication practice in chronic illness
- Authors: Williams, Kevin F
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: Chronic diseases -- Chemotherapy Chronically ill -- Care Pharmacy -- Study and teaching Pharmacy -- Practice Social medicine Health -- Sociological aspects Diseases -- Sociological aspects Health -- Psychological aspects
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:1322 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003955
- Description: This study originates from experiences which led me to question the way pharmacists are equipped to advise and support the medicine-taking practice of patients using chronic medication. The study offers a critical theoretical consideration of underlying perspectives informing pharmacy education. I propose following a critical realist ontological perspective, a social realist understanding of social structure and human agency, and a sociocultural epistemology. Based on these perspectives, I consider a sociological critique of ‘health’, ‘disease’, ‘illness’ and ‘sickness’ perspectives on medicine-taking, and of pharmacy as a profession. I then propose an experiential learning approach, with an emphasis on developing reflexivity through affective learning. I follow this with an illustrative case study. Following a critical discourse analysis of student texts from the case study, I conclude that there is evidence that experiential learning may prove useful in developing pharmacy students’ reflexive competency to support the provision of pharmaceutical care to patients using chronic medications.
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- Date Issued: 2006
White women writing white : a study of identity and representation in (post-)apartheid literatures of South Africa
- Authors: West, Mary Eileen
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism , Identity (Psychology)
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , DPhil
- Identifier: vital:8443 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/442 , South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism , Identity (Psychology)
- Description: This thesis examines aspects of identity and representation using contemporary theories and definitions emerging out of a growing body of work known as whiteness studies. The condition of whiteness as it continues to inform identity politics in post-apartheid South Africa is explored in an analysis of selected texts written by white women, to demonstrate the ways in which whiteness continues to suggest normativity. In reading a representative selection of literatures produced in contemporary South Africa by white women writers, this study aims to illustrate the ambivalence apparent in the interstitial manifestations of emergent reconciliatory gestures that are at odds with residual traces of superiority. A sampling of disparate texts is examined to explore the representations of race and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa in the light of contemporary theories of whiteness which posit it as a powerful and invisible identification. The analysis attempts to plot a continuum from writers who are least, through to those who are most, aware of whiteness as a cultural construct and of their own positionality in relation to the discursive dynamics that inform South African racial politics. A contextualising overview of the terrain of whiteness studies is provided in Chapter One, marking the ideological and theoretical affiliations of this project, and foregrounding the construction of whiteness as an imagined identity in contemporary cultural criticism. It also provides a justification for the selection of the textual material under scrutiny. Chapter Two explores a genre that has been identified as a growing trend in South African fiction: the production of pulp fiction written by white middle-class women. Two such texts are the focus of this chapter, namely, Pamela Jooste’s People like Ourselves (2004) and Susan Mann’s One Tongue Singing (2005), and the complicities and clichés that are characteristic of popular literature are examined. Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue (2003) is the focus of Chapter Three. It is examined as a book offering the writer’s personal response to the difficulties of transformation within the first decade of South African democracy. Krog confronts her own defensiveness, her sense of normalcy, and her sense of alienation in relation to multiple encounters with different people. Chapter Four focuses on the journalism of Marianne Thamm. Her role as columnist for the popular women’s magazine, Fairlady is explored, particularly in relation to the inclusion of a contending voice writing against the general tenets of Fairlady. Thamm’s critique of the mores governing bourgeois white womanhood is read in relation to her role as officially sanctioned Court Jester. Her Fairlady columns have been collected in Mental Floss (2002) but the analysis includes selected columns from 2003 to 2005. Echo Location: A Guide to Sea Point for Residents and Visitors (1998) by Karen Press is the focus of Chapter Five. Her work is read as examining a white South African crisis of belonging in relation to the implications of mapping the co-ordinates of whiteness in South Africa. Chapter Six offers a reading of four short stories, written by Nadine Gordimer and Marlene van Niekerk. These stories are juxtaposed to trace an anxious impasse in white responses to suburbia, the place of enactment of white bourgeois mores, which both writers interrogate.
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- Date Issued: 2006