Conveners as champions of collaboration in the public sector: a case from South Africa

This article analyses the role of conveners in facilitating interorganisational collaboration. Consistent with previous research, the article shows that conveners help overcome the obstacles frequent in interorganisational collaboration processes. It also illustrates further how their effectiveness depends on their credibility among the partners, their familiarity with the collaborative project and their being perceived as unbiased intermediaries. Most interestingly, the article advances our knowledge on conveners by suggesting that their behaviour is consistent with that common among ‘champions’ of innovation. They are likely to assume a leadership role and use influence politics, such as salesmanship, personal appeal and persuasion. These findings build on a case study of successful collaboration between two government agencies in South Africa. We believe, however, that the findings are likely to apply to other types of organisation, private and voluntary, and to other country contexts. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mandelafying the public service in South Africa: Towards a new theory

A surfeit of service delivery disapprovals in South Africa is a clear reflection of the failure of the Public Service of South from the local, provincial, and national government to effectively and efficiently deliver service to its citizenry. The rise in a dissatisfied citizenry stems from a precise social realization, which envisions the failure of the state to deliver services to the public in an impartial, responsible, translucent, and befitting manner. This has resulted in widespread service delivery protests, which has become the most famous form of response to poor service delivery by frustrated citizens. This article argues for the mandelafication of the South African public service against the background of a cocktail of factors ranging from corruption, lack of transparency and accountability, incompetence, and lack of commitment to work ethics personified by Mandela. The article further argues for the upholding of the dominant constructs in which this mandelafication is grounded in such as proper ethics, humanitarianism, transparency, accountability, empathy, and selflessness, which characterized Nelson Mandela.     

The provocative public sector: Domestic political protest and public sector growth in the OECD, 1965–1982

The results shown in Tables 1 through 8 above are consistent in that %GG is repeatedly shown to be significant whether making cross-national comparisons of DPP or predicting intra-national variations over time. Therefore, Hypotheses 1a and 1b are confirmed. The confirmation of Hypotheses 2a and 2b shows that, taking into account public sector size, government growth is most provocative in countries where it represents a major socio-economic change (i.e., where the public sector is small). Government growth has a neutral impact where the role of the public sector is long-established (i.e., where the public sector is large).Hypotheses 3a and 3b posited that average and annual rates of economic growth would be inversely associated with domestic protest. These hypotheses, too, were confirmed. The belief that economic growth rates would clearly provide the margin of affordability for public sector growth was not confirmed, as the coefficient of the interaction term (%GG*%GDP) was not statistically significant.