Browsing by Author "Grossman, Jonathan"

Now showing 1 - 13 of 13
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    Corporate Social Responsibility a contribution to development? : a study examining a major company's CSR initiative in Cape Town
    (2011) Andolfi, Marco; Grossman, Jonathan
    The following study highlights the debates around Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and explores to what extent the engagement of companies is contributing to development. This study focuses on one major company and its developmental activities in the Western Cape. The research is based on a main concern with the role of CSR in impoverished communities and whether CSR is contributing to development. Using a case study approach, semi-structured interviews as well as document analysis and observation have been conducted in order to achieve the research objectives.
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    Cosatu's policy on worker education, 1985-1992 : changes and continuities
    (2003) Andrew, Sally; Cooper, Linda; Grossman, Jonathan
    The South African literature on worker education notes developments in Cosatu's approach to education from the 1980's to the 1990's. I critically explore the changes and continuities evident in Cosatu's policy on worker education from 1985 to 1992. I examined the national documentation produced by Cosatu during these years and conducted selected interviews with 11 people in the Western Cape who were active in Cosatu during this period. I qualitatively categorise and analyse the information on Cosatu's policy. Secondary data, together with the interviews provide both illustrative and contextual information on the policy, practice and politics of Cosatu at that time. The approach to worker education contained in the policy from 1985 to 1988 can be distinguished from that of the 1989-1992 period. Cosatu's policy on worker education in the 1985-1988 period contained a critique of capitalist education, an argument that education should contribute to socialist transformation, and the assertion of an 'alternative' education founded on progressive principles. In the 1989-1992 period some of the progressive principles evident in the 1985-1988 policy on worker education were still asserted. However there were stark changes from the earlier policy. The 1989-1992 policy asserted that education should assist with reconstructing the economy and developing individual careers. Cosatu was no longer promoting an alternative to the existing capitalist education, but was pushing for workers to have greater access to this system. I characterise the dominant approach to worker education of the 1985-1988 period as 'radical' or 'transformatory', whereas the 1989-1992 period increasingly manifested elements of a 'service' and 'instrumental' approach, which I characterise as 'reformist'.
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    Deafhood and exclusion: a study of deaf adolescents perceptions of Love Life's HIV and AIDS communication campaigns
    (2012) Ngwenya, Nobukhosi; Grossman, Jonathan
    In particular, the research conducted focused on participants’ perceptions around issues of access to Love Life’s HIV and AIDS campaigns. Data was collected through a questionnaire survey, a focus group, individual interviews and a HIV and AIDS campaign design task. The findings reveal that, firstly, the participants are aware of what Love Life is and what they aim to do, and; secondly, participants have very limited access to Love Life’s print and television campaigns.
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    Encounters with problems and challenges and the formal complaints mechanism in public health: Accounts and perceptions of a set of junior health professionals during early employment experience
    (2019) Petersen, Wendy; Grossman, Jonathan
    The South African health system consists of partly privatized and partly public health care. It is the latter that is responsible for the wellbeing of the majority of the South African population. It is also the latter however that faces multiple challenges. Of these are challenges relating to working hours, staff to patient ratio, and burnout, as well as the availability of resources / equipment; supervision and training and the experiences of bullying. Moreover, research shows that while the working conditions / contexts as well as the availability of supervision that junior healthcare professionals work in and have access to has been studied extensively in both Northern and Southern literature; the bullying experienced by junior doctors and other junior health professionals have been extensively studied in Western literature with very little being done to study this phenomenon. Further, very little has been done to study questions pertaining to the mechanisms of laying complaints about these challenges in the South. Against this background, the thesis was concerned to explore experiences and perceptions of laying complaints to supervisors and the largest health regulatory body in South Africa, the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA). The thesis used semi-structured interviews to interview six junior healthcare professionals who are registered and thus regulated by the HPCSA in South Africa and who are in the process of or who have recently completed their compulsory year/s of internship / community service in any public hospital in South Africa. This was done in order to explore their accounts and perceptions of challenges and complaints mechanisms pertaining to these challenges in their first postgraduate years. The public health system in South Africa is still rife with many challenges. My research found that according to their own accounts, junior healthcare workers encounter these as direct challenges in their everyday experience. They bear the brunt of these by having to deal with major burnout associated with long working hours and understaffing. It also shows that their account is that there is a lack of much needed resources and equipment and that challenges associated with this often have dire consequences for both them and their patients. Further, my research showed that they continue to feel that they are not being properly trained and supervised and that they do indeed face many challenges relating to bullying behavior by senior health professionals. Connected to this, my research showed that despite being aware of the complaints mechanisms in place, these junior healthcare workers often have had negative experiences with laying complaints and / or have negative perceptions about complaint mechanisms such as their supervisors and the HPCSA. In sum, the findings show that these challenges sustain and exacerbate each other in a vicious cycle in South Africa. While the sample used in this research was based in issues of access and availability and is not representative, these patterns and themes emerged consistently and thus warrant further investigation both in themselves and as possibly representative of what is happening in the medical profession in South Africa.
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    'Feminisation and outsourced work' : a case study of the meaning of 'transformation' through the lived experience of non-core work at the University of Cape Town
    (2008) Bardill, Lindiwe; Bennett, Jane; Grossman, Jonathan
    This dissertation examines the meaning of university 'transformation' from the perspective of workers in 'non-core' zones of work. Mergers, outsourcing, retrenching and rightsizing, have become features of the post-apartheid higher education landscape; and they seem set to remain. Through higher education restructuring work has been divided into 'core' and 'non-core' zones of work and 'non-core' work has largely been outsourced. The men and women working in the outsourced zones of 'non-core' work engage in the 'reproductive work' of the university and yet they largely remain hidden from institutional debates of transformation.
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    Invaluable and outsourced: experiences of private company cleaners working in the public hospital sector in Cape Town
    (2014) Petro, Lyndsey; Grossman, Jonathan
    In the hospital context, and in research on hospitals, cleaning staff often find themselves on the periphery. This peripheral status is exacerbated when cleaners are employed by private cleaning companies. The intersection of locations these cleaners find themselves in, as cleaners, outsourced support staff and members of the working poor means that their work-life experiences take a particular shape. In an attempt to better understand the work experiences of these staff members, I conducted qualitative interviews with 8 female private company cleaners from four different public hospitals in Cape Town. Alienation, job insecurity, working poverty and emotional labour are used as tools to unpack and understand these experiences. Here I argue that these workers perform work that is far from ancillary or non-essential, work central to the functioning of the hospital space. However, the scope of their work is unappreciated and as a result, so too are the health and safety risks they are exposed to, making them especially vulnerable. This vulnerability is compounded by insecurity and the struggle to make ends meet. Alienating conditions are evident as they are constantly reminded of their status at the bottom of the hospital hierarchy and made to feel insignificant. Engaging with the experiences of these cleaners shows how alienation, insecurity, working poverty and emotional labour manifest in interesting ways. It allows us to see the numerous challenges they face in their working lives, particularly as private company cleaners in a hospital.
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    Listening to experience: the narratives of a Zimbabwean migrant living and working in Cape Town
    (2012) Bresnihan, Sive; Ismail, Salma; Grossman, Jonathan
    This study explored the experiences of Tendai, a 50 year old migrant from Zimbabwe currently living and working in Cape Town. The approach adopted was that of narrative inquiry, an approach to research that advocates open and informal interviewing and brings theory into conversation with stories as opposed to using it as a kind of structuring framework. The field work for this study was carried out over a period of 4 moths. Interviews were held in Tendai's home in Khayelitsha and were recorded and transcribed, along with detailed field notes.
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    Protecting livelihoods? : a study of informal traders at Mitchell's Plain town centre market
    (2011) Huss, Mary Laura; Grossman, Jonathan
    The implementation of a new citywide Informal Trading By-law and a permit system for registering traders left over 200 traders without a space to trade. Using multiple qualitative research methods, document review, interviews, photography and observation, this study seeks to highlight the experiences and views of a group of MPTCM traders working to protect their livelihoods.
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    The Rural Foundation, management and change on fruit farms : a case study of selected farms in the Elgin area
    (1990) Mayson, David; Grossman, Jonathan
    This is an exploratory study which investigates changes introduced by management on farms in Elgin and explores the perceptions of some of those involved in the changes. The initiatives and activities of the Rural Foundation for Community Development (Rural Foundation) and its involvement in these changes forms a crucial part of the exploration. Three questions direct the study. 1. What are the changes that have been introduced? 2. Why were they introduced? 3. What is the social meaning of the changes? The study is based on a case study of four farms. Documentary material was collected from a variety of sources including the Rural Foundation, the South African Government, as well as other agencies operating in the field. Interviews with various actors were conducted, including management and a selection of workers on each of the four farms, Rural Foundation officials as well as other actors connected to the developments on the farms. The study is informed by historical materialist theory and draws from certain labour process theories. Important for the study was the discussion raised in these theories around the effect that workers' motivation has on their productivity. The study is located in the context of the national historical development of capitalist agriculture since the Second World War. More specifically it is situated locally in terms of changes that occurred on Elgin farms more generally prior to the 1980's as well as the present general circumstances in the area. Three fields of change are identified on the four farms: (i) training of workers, (ii) new incentives and pay structures, and (iii) community development. It is asserted that these changes are measures introduced by management in an attempt to, firstly, decrease production costs by employing greater numbers of women and migrant workers and paying them less. Secondly, they are aimed at increasing the productivity of workers through measures designed to improve the 'quality' and stability of workers and to develop a new authority structure on the farms. Four trends are thus identified as occurring on the farms: 1. Increasing use of women and migrant workers. 2. An improvement in workers' living conditions and standards. 3. An increasing emphasis on improving workers' productivity. 4. A shift in the emphasis on control towards developing workers' consent.
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    Towards a theory of pedagogy, learning and knowledge in an 'everyday' context : a case study of South African trade union
    (2005) Cooper, Linda; Soudien, Crain; Grossman, Jonathan
    This thesis aims to document and theorise processes of learning and forms of pedagogy and knowledge in the trade union organisational context. It seeks to establish how these vary across sites within the union and in the context of broader historical changes in trade unions' social and political role. The thesis also aims to contribute to the development of a conceptual approach that will allow processes and forms of learning, pedagogy and knowledge in informal or non-formal, collective, social-action contexts such as the trade union to be compared with those in specialised education domains. The study adopts a critical, interpretive, qualitative case study methodology, and is based on a single case of the Cape Town branch of the South African Municipal Workers' Union. Research was carried out in three organisational settings: the union's organised education programmes, sites of everyday organisational involvement, and the occasion of a national strike of the union.
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    Workforce control and manipulation : a case study of the social relations of power in the canning industry in Ashton
    (1998) Talbut, Carol-Jane; Grossman, Jonathan; Russell, M
    This thesis is a case study of the social relations of power within the canning industry in Ashton. The project had three main aims: 1) to document the physical situation at the two canning factories in Ashton, in order to profile the basic composition of the workforce, aspects of the labour process and working and employment conditions; 2) to examine the processes and mechanisms of control and then 3) to use the first two aims as a basis to take stock of what this control means in terms of workers lives: i.e. examining the lived experience of 'control'. I adopted a primarily qualitatively focused approach and used a combination of interviews and group discussions to elicit the information necessary to inform these aims. The results showed how in the logic of capitalist development, pre-existing social divisions are exploited. The interaction of these pre-existing social divisions within the structure of the workforce, combined with deliberate control mechanisms serves to divide, atomise and thereby control the workforce. I found the workers to be divided by gender and race, these divisions are intensified by differences between whether workers have seasonal or permanent employment and where they live. These divisions, aggravated by differences, are then combined with the deliberate use of piecework, the assembly line and the factories recruitment system. Workers experienced most of these control mechanisms as normal and natural and are mostly thankful to have work.