Course Description

Required Courses:

1st Semester

SOSS 7021 Labour and Development

Much of the literature that explores the determinants of economic development has focused either on the market and its social carrier, employers, or on the developmental state and its technocratic elites. This developmental literature has tended to see peasants and workers as either victims or beneficiaries, but rarely as active agents of economic and political transformation. Our approach will be to analyse the role of labour in the development process both historically and in the current epoch of globalisation. Our focus will be on labour and development in Southern Africa and the Global South. A key challenge facing labour is its relationship to the post-colonial state, especially the role of labour in economic policy formulation and implementation. Another important concern is the relationship of trade unions (which traditionally organise mainly permanent or `core’ workers) to other civil society organisations, the working poor, peasants and the informal economy. To answer these questions it is necessary to understand labour as an independent actor, its evolution and the dilemmas it faces in developing societies.

2nd Semester

SOSS 7022 Economic Policy, Globalisation and Labour

The aim of the course will be to understand different approaches to macroeconomics and their implications for trade unions. It will examine the basi assumptions and policy conclusions of central paradigms in economics; Keynesian, Classical, Neo-classical and Marxist. The role of wages in different economic paradigms will be examined as well as the role of incomes policy, macroeconomic co-operation and labour market institutions.

Electives (choice of one from Semester 1 or 2):

1st Semester

SOCL 7015 Labour Movements in Developing Societies

This course will examine the role and impact labour movements have had on democratic transitions in developing societies. During the last two decades labour (in common cause with other formations in civil society) has made a dramatic reappearance, challenging economic restructuring and structural adjustment policies and spearheading oppositional political projects against authoritarian regimes. But labour’s impact is varied: in many countries these broad struggles for democracy have contributed to a transition, in others their activities have resulted in a stalemate with the old regime, and in still others, the oppositional movements have been decisively routed. Even in those cases where labour has contributed to regime change, profound political and economic problems have resulted in a stalemate with the new regimes, thus threatening the consolidation of democracy.

The course will explore the divergent trajectories of labour movements in developing societies and identify trends which have implications for theorising labour’s role and impact in democratic transitions. The labour movements in Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, Zambia and Zimbabwe will be examined, with specific reference to their impact on democratic struggles, state-union relations, class formation, the politics of economic liberalisation and structural adjustment, the reassertion of civil society and the transition to democracy.

SOCL 7012 Global Institutions and Economic Restructuring

This course examines the involvement of global institutions in development as a process of establishing intellectual hegemony of influencing individuals and groups; shaping ideas, discourses and debates; and affecting institutional arrangements inside and outside the state. In this respect, the study of their effect on development is simultaneously an investigation of the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of bureaucracy and institutions. The course focuses on global institutions which are involved in promoting development in developing societies, including South Africa. These include, in particular, formal institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation. In addition, the course examines the role of new social movements that have emerged in opposition to these institutions.

SOCL 7043 Land and Agrarian Reform

The course will introduce students to some of the key debates that have come to characterise land and agrarian reform in post-apartheid (1994) democratic South Africa and by extension the Southern and Eastern African region. The cardinal aim of the course is to equip students with the knowledge base and skills required to critically engage with policy debates on land and agrarian issues. The central thrust of the course is to understand the protracted nature of land reform policy making process in countries undergoing democratization, the normative limits of land reform policies and the implementation problems that beleaguer their success. Students will also be introduced to comparative debates between Zimbabwe’s “collapsed” land reform programme and South Africa’s contemporary land reform process.

SOCL 7010 (SOCL 4014) Economic Sociology

This course will introduce students to the main paradigms that shape modern economic policy, and inform economic policy debates. Not an economics course, it will nonetheless provide post-graduate students in the social sciences with a solid intellectual basis in economic models that will enable policy analysis, advocacy and critique. It will be structured around a series of seminars - led by a facilitator but driven by students.

In recent years, the division between social and economic theory has been consistently attacked from neighbouring disciplines, from new perspectives such as postmodernism and Foucauldian studies and through attempts within both economics and sociology to develop an 'economic sociology' which recognises that economic action can only be properly understood in terms of social institutions. The primary issue of the course is to problematise our ideas of what we actually mean by the term "economy", and hence its relation to the social, and to understand the consequences of different ideas of 'the economy' for sociology. We shall focus on the economic in its relationship with social institutions, ideology and politics. This will involve critical analysis of economic theory, and examining how sociological analysis might reconceptualise economic life as a foundation for a sociology of economic life.

2nd Semester

SOCL 7048 (SOCL 4045) Labour in the Global Economy

This course aims to develop a framework for understanding the nature of contemporary processes of economic restructuring and its impact on the world of work. Drawing on research in both a South African and U.S. context, key case studies in the changing nature of work will be examined. This will provide a deeper understanding of how broad macro-level changes in the nature of contemporary capitalism are mediated by a variety of technological, political, and socio-economic factors in particular industries and geographic contexts. Finally, an in-depth look at workers’ responses to these changes at different scales (local, regional, global) will help deepen our understanding of the contested nature of workplace restructuring while exploring promising strategies for improving working conditions.

SOCL 7009 (SOCL 4009) Development as Ideology and Practice

The last forty years have been described as ‘the age of development’, but traditional development has perpetuated inequality through its emphasis on market-oriented, technology-based, resource intensive and undemocratic development strategies. Third World development strategies have largely been imposed from above and have failed to improve the quality of life of the majority. These have unfolded in a context of deteriorating macro-economic conditions, declining productivity and infrastructure, a rapid regression in social welfare provisioning and a degeneration of the physical environment.

The course will address development ideology and practice as an historical process of the transformation of social structures and relations through the interventions of states, governments, markets and social movements. It will critically examine theories and explanations of development and underdevelopment, as well as the practice of development. There are many lessons for South Africa from elsewhere in the Third World as it attempts to implement the Reconstruction and Development Programme. In this light, alternative conceptions of development will be explored, with an emphasis on the role of democratic public action, participation and empowerment.