Corporate Governance and Reporting in Contexts of Social Justice and Equity, Deconstructing the Case of Historically Disadvantaged Universities in South Africa

Abstract

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.

Reimagining Corporate Social Responsibility in the Idea of University Education as the Public Good

“…Therefore, the case of accounting for quality, as the idea of university education as a public good, would be regarded as incomplete about other compelling cases about quality. The WSU SER claims have confirmed similar cases about the study of HDUs in the South African transformation project [4]. These are the cases where mistrust instead of trust, poor reputation instead of good, and illegitimacy can remain endemic governance and leadership challenges.…”

“…This then refers to the need for individual abilities (individual agency) to become institutional capabilities (corporate agency) where the institution must be able to engage its complex challenges in ways that can be more responsive and relevant to regional challenges. The failure in such a project continues to be the case of stagnation about such universities and of pretense by its management and leadership systems [4].…”

“…Real level: generative powers are possessed but may not be actualized (as events and processes, and further as experienced and observed) The domains and social reality of corporate social responsibility as adapted from Dwayi [4].…”

The Islands of Sanity in the Killing Fields of Inequalities: A juxtaposed case in Management, Leadership and Governance Practices!

“…The IF Report indicated serious gaps in the UNEC MLG systems, namely the grievance procedure and the dispute management policies, and better still, the Office of the Ombudsman, as is the normal practice in other institutions. Strangely, as reported in this article, both the Appointment and Selection Policies and the Job Upgrading Policies, while official and active, were deliberately undermined, which therefore raises serious cases about "corporate social responsibility" and "great leadership practices and good leaders" (Dwayi, 2022, a, Dwayi, 2022. In this particular case, all the parties who were implicated in this case dismally failed the integrity test and therefore cannot begin to claim to being men of honour and women of virtue.…”

“…The strange phenomenon is that similar cases had long been reported about how the university education sector seemed to undermine the management, leadership and governance systems and processes to the point of subjecting these University into Administration Regimes (Dwayi, 2021, Dwayi, 2022. During the time of finalising this article, the HETSA sector was still bedevilled by yet another sad news about maladministration and corruption which can threaten the very idea of University Education and its academic project.…”