Historically disadvantaged universities in South Africa seem to grapple with corporate governance reporting issues, which continue to engender a state of perpetual crisis for them. In response, the National Department of Higher Education and Training has had to come up with interventions such as replacing university councils by administration regimes. The objective of this study was to examine and critique the underlying conditions that allow for the governance crisis to continue unabated while the government interventions seem to be in place. I adopted a mixed method approach to structure the study coherently and logically. Data sources were predominantly institutional reports about the selected cases, which remain as public records. By employing a critical realist lens and its positions about deep ontology, stratified reality, emergence and multi-causation, I could deconstruct the concept of corporate governance as generally written about in the mainstream literature. Results suggest that the source of the crisis derives from the complexity about corporate governance and reporting in relation to not only roles and responsibilities but also in terms of the ideas, beliefs, and values thereof, which therefore constitute the contradictions of position and practice. The discussion highlights the value of understanding transformative agency as the practical alternative to what should be advances in corporate governance and reporting.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), as the concept of both practice and research, is still generally understood and explained in narrow political lenses, basically due to the economic and instrumentalist rationality. Such rationality tends to result into more reproductive outcomes about the social conditions than what ought to be transformative. As such, not much is researched and documented about CSR in what could be alternative practical explanations beyond the taken-for-granted orientations. Toward closing this seeming research gap in the theory-practice nexus, the institutional research about which this article is reporting has examined the dialectical relationship of CSR with the idea of university education as the public good. The study entailed the content analysis of the institutional records in one case of university education in South Africa. The history of the university and the relations that the university has with its community were complex enough to make a single case study about the value of corporate social responsibility and the idea of the public and common good (CSR for UE-PG). The main finding of the research is that the university is grappling with her history, which constrains her from transcending into new heights about CSR for UE-PG, despite the commitments to do so!

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