Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2009): African Sociological Review

4- State-in-Society: the Mutual Constitutiveness of the Developmental State and Higher Education in South Africa

https://doi.org/10.4314/asr.v13i1.57747
Beverly Thaver
Lionel Thaver

African Sociological Review, Vol. 13 No. 1 (2009): African Sociological Review

Abstract

Seeking to go beyond the pessimism and reification of contemporary analyses of the state in
Africa, this article applies Migdal’s State in Society (2001) approach to the field of higher
education transformation in South Africa. It argues that the state is best understood through
its actual practices, particularly at those points where it reaches into society through policy
implementation and, conversely, where society through its institutions in turn reaches into the
state. In the course of these engagements, social boundaries are constituted through alliances,
accommodations and resistances and have a mutually transformative effect on both state
and society. The article shows how, with regard to both the image and the practices of the
state, the relationship between the developmental state and higher education in South Africa
reveals a range of tensions around issues such as accountability, autonomy, transformation and
globalisation; and it concludes that Migdal’s approach offers a fruitful theoretical corrective to
state-centric and socio-centric views of the state-society relationship

Keywords

Developmental state South Africa globalisation higher education
Thaver, B., & Thaver, L. (2009). 4- State-in-Society: the Mutual Constitutiveness of the Developmental State and Higher Education in South Africa. African Sociological Review, 13(1), 57–77. https://doi.org/10.4314/asr.v13i1.57747
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Author Biographies

Beverly Thaver

 Faculty of Education, University of the Western Cape Email: bthaver@uwc.ac.za 

 

Lionel Thaver

 Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of the Western Cape Email: lthaver@uwc.ac.za

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