Introduction

In this article, we investigate the publication strategies and decisions of academics in two key fields, social anthropology and educational policy, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. We ask how research output in South Africa has been shaped over the last two decades by the increasing priority attached to international rankings and its pressure to publish in internationally recognized and accredited journals.

Structurally, the article begins with a brief description of the contemporary higher education South African landscape and the policies it has developed with respect to publishing. It then provides a brief background of the four academics from the fields of education and social anthropology who were interviewed for the study. As part of this background, the article also describes the nature of their fields and the place of these fields in the higher education landscape. The paper then looks at the data from the interviews and in a final section considers the significance of this data. The intention in this section of the study is to develop an analysis of the trends and patterns that are discernible in the decisions that the academics make over the period under review. We do, however, recognize that this pool of subjects is limited and that more work is necessary to develop a comprehensive picture of South African higher education research choices and directions. Methodologically, and consistent with the larger international project with which this research was associated, the article draws on two sources of data, namely publication outputs from three selected years: 1993, 2003 and 2013, and interviews with four key subjects. The interviews focused on the academics’ experiences of the changing higher education landscape and their responses to it. It looks specifically at their publication strategies in light of the changing expectations imposed on them by their universities.

The South African Higher Education Landscape

The South African higher education system takes its origins from the country’s colonial history. It has gone through four major phases of development. Its first phase from 1829 to the turn of the nineteenth century, saw the establishment of at least six institutions which offered training in the major areas of the colony’s public life, such as law, education, the arts, the natural sciences and in technical areas such as land surveying and engineering. The system went through a second phase, from about 1905 to the late 1950s when key institutions were either consolidated from the first phase or brought into being de novo. In this phase, the essential character of the South African university was put in place. It was white and essentially male and took its curriculum and organizational structure from developments unfolding out of the post-industrial British higher education landscape.

A third phase took shape after 1959 when the apartheid government institutionalized its segregation policy and brought into being a new generation of ethnic universities. The system in the third phase, at the height of apartheid, consisted of 36 institutions essentially divided in two streams, comprehensive universities and more technically oriented institutions called technikons. It was this divided and hierarchized legacy that the new post-apartheid democratic government confronted in 1994. It was decided as a consequence, to restructure the system after 1996 through a process of mergers and closures. The mergers and closures were intended to address the inequalities and injustices inherited from the apartheid era. This, the fourth phase of higher education development in South Africa, was marked by a great deal of re-assessment and review (see, inter alia, Bunting, 1994; National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) Report, 1996; Department of Education, 1996; Beckham, 2000; Cloete, et al., 1997, 2002, 2004; Cooper and Subotzky, 2001; Thaver, 2003; Mji, 2002; Council on Higher Education (CHE), 2000; Bundy, 2006). Out of these reviews emerged a system made up of 23 institutions. As can be expected, this last phase has seen the country in a great deal of debate and discussion as it seeks to understand the role of the academy in the reconstruction of the country. How the system balances the challenge of addressing its unequal and discriminatory past, on the one hand, and its key strategic human capacity development challenges, on the other, has been at the heart of the debates.

The significance of these challenges for this contribution was that they required the universities to address two seemingly conflicting structural demands: the inclusion of historically marginalized peoples of colour, and the simultaneous ratcheting up of their capacity to produce high-level scientific outputs, PhD graduates, new scientific patents, and not least of all publications in accredited journals. In 1993, just before the new government came into power, participation rates in the system, using the apartheid government’s system of classification, were 69.7 % for white students and 12.1 and 13 %, respectively, for African and coloured communities (Cloete and Bunting, 2000, p. 15).1 Of the 473,000 students registered in these institutions, 191,000 were African, 223,000 white and the rest coloured and Indian (ibid., 18). In addition, Badsha and Harper (2000, p. 17) suggest that the majority of the African students would have been first-generation students, especially those at Historically Black Institutions. The majority of the academic staff would also have been largely white and male (see Cooper and Subotzky, 2001; Thaver, 2003; CHE, 2004). In the current era, while the number of black students in the system has increased dramatically, the number of white academic members of staff is still greater than all the rest put together. In 2013, there were 52,571 academic members of staff in the system of whom the majority, 26,847, were deemed to be white (CHE, 2015, p. 47) and only 17,753 African. Complicating this basic picture outlined above, is the uneven racial character of excellence in the system. Of the country’s 23 major institutions, four are among the world’s leading research and teaching universities and all of them are historically white.

Significantly, it is with this basic morphology and all its attendant tensions that the system has come to confront the question of its place in the global arena. This morphology demands that it addresses the imperative questions posed by its local context and history, while, at the same time, it indicates its commitment to high-quality outputs, particularly as these are defined by publications in accredited journals.

Publication Policies in South African higher Education

An important exercise that needs to be undertaken in the South African context is to understand how historically disadvantaged black institutions have handled the challenge of publishing and especially publishing in accredited journals. This study is unable to reflect on this question. It focuses, instead, on the advantaged end of the higher education system, i.e. those institutions that would have been classified as white in the apartheid era. These institutions have grappled with the demands of both inclusion and excellence.

Molefe’s (2010, p. 1) study on performance measurement in South African Universities reminds us that universities in the 1990s were marked by a “a laissez-faire approach to performance management and thus operated on a ‘high trust’ basis within an ethos that emphasised independence of thought and scholarship, academic freedom and collegiality”. There was not much monitoring or assessment of academic staff. This was to change 10 years into the new democracy and higher education institutions were expected to “face the economic and social realities and become accountable and more market and consumer responsive to provide ‘value for money’ to [their] clients” (Molefe, 2010, p. 1). Not only were appointment criteria significantly increased in most universities, but they also came to be rigorously applied. Appointments at the median rank of ‘senior lecturer’ in the major universities required the completion of the PhD. Promotion through the ranks required publication in accredited journals. Annual performance assessments for individual academics were based on publication targets in internationally accredited journals set nationally and, on occasion, by institutions themselves. These changes were in part at least due to national policies that they were expected to comply with. The policy demands put pressure on the scope, nature and intensity of academic work while also subjecting academic work to performance management and quality assessment (Mapesela and Strydom, 2005).

From about the middle of the 1990s, South African universities have paid a great deal of attention to increasing their output of PhDs, to building their research capacity to what they believe to be international standards, to compete for and win research grants and to support their members of staff to write for the world’s leading research journals.

The situation in which they found themselves after 1994 was that they were producing only a small number of PhDs each year (see Mlambo, 2010; Samuel, 2012). This number would improve in 2013 to 16,039 registrations and 2051 qualifications but some distance off the target of 10,000 projected for 2030. The value of research grants won increased substantially after 1994 but was still modest compared to improvements recorded in countries of a similar socio-economic status such as Mexico and Turkey. Within the system, most researchers depend on government. In 2011, the South African government allocated R2.2 billion (approximately US$200 million) for research (Turrell, 2012). The volume of the country’s research output also increased. In terms of the 2011 Thomson Reuters, National Science Indicators database institutions increased their output from 3617 papers in 2000–7468 in 2010 giving the country a world ranking of 33 (see Nombembe, 2012, p. 2). In 2013, journal publication outputs increased from 11,035.72 units in 2012 to 11,997.38 (DoHET, 2015, p. 11). According to the scientometric research by Anastassios Pouris (2012; and see Tongai, 2013, para 13), South Africa more than doubled its paper publication numbers, from 3617 to 7468 between 2000 and 2010. The University of Cape Town, the institution to which the four academics interviewed for this study belong, increased its output year by year. The reasons behind this increase are complex and perhaps have more to do with performance management criteria and the changing requirements for promotion, than only the indirect monetary incentives.

The incentive and reward system for publishing in the country is based on a subsidy model managed by its Department of Higher Education and Training (DoHET). DoHET allocates research subsidies based on unit calculations for approved publications. At the current time, this approved list consists of approximately 300 journals. Institutions receive the equivalent of US$12,000 for every article published in an accredited journal and R1 m (approximately US$80,000) for an accepted monograph dependent on its number of pages. The journals have to be ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) and IBSS (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences) accredited journals.

The government also established a grant-making structure, the National Research Foundation (NRF) (http://www.nrf.co.za/files/file/NRF%20Rating%20categories-approved%20EEC%2013%February%2013.pdf), for all the sciences except the medical field which has its own funding facility in the South African Medical Research Council. The purpose of the NRF is to support the growth of research in a number of strategically chosen thematic fields. An additional incentive mechanism in the national system of innovation is the rating of researchers. Two dimensions of this rating structure have relevance. The first is a general framework applied to all researchers on the basis of which eligibility, depending on rating, for particular levels of financial support is available. The second is the establishment of dedicated research chairs with committed funding to stimulate the production of high-level research. Important about these policy initiatives, especially the rating system is their purpose. The intention behind them is to encourage researchers to publish in journals with high-impact factors.

These national policies hoped, among other things, to increase research output in higher education institutions (HEIs). The arrival of managerialism and the subsequent introduction of performance management criteria remains a contentious issue and many researchers consider this business-oriented practice incompatible with the objectives of HEIs (Seyama and Smith, 2015). South Africa is not unique in this regard. Responses from the academic community have been mixed. They have been entangled in the contribution of high-performing academics to their institutions’ international rankings. If we are to take note of what the country’s leading Vice-Chancellors are saying, we might get some idea of how leadership in the universities has responded. They have, it seems, worked hard to steer a middle path for their institutions between acknowledging the need to operate against the new global pressures and the imperative of responding to the demands to transform their universities to reflect the South African reality. Adam Habib, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand announced recently that he would be appointing 30 A-rated researchers: “…. If we want to become one of the top institutions in the world we need the best researchers in the world” (Govender, 2013, p. 13). Max Price, the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cape Town explained the ‘dangers of the rankings’: “…they are designed with an eye on universities in developed countries, … they may lead to behaviours and redesign of strategy to improve the rankings rather than to do what’s right for the local setting” (Price, 2010, para 4). Another Vice-Chancellor, Saleem Badat (2010, para 9) at Rhodes University, said that the rankings have ‘little intrinsic value and serve no meaningful educational or social purpose’. Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State argued that responding to the global pressure to publish in high-impact factor journals would discourage academics from addressing local issues. Jansen (2013, p. 15) made the point,

(w)hat is more important? That you produce lots of research in science journals that is cited by your peers in Norway and Boston? Or that the knowledge you produced through research in your school of engineering solved problems of annual flooding in the squatter housing of Khayelitsha and Kwa Mashu?2 Or that the applied research produced through your school of education actually made an impact on turning around disadvantaged schools in Orange Farm or Zwelitsha?

Badat (2010, p. 4), went on to argue, that “to define the university enterprise by these specific outputs, and to (support)… it only through metrics that measure them, is to misunderstand the nature of the enterprise and its potential to deliver social benefit”.

Against this background, it has become clear, as the data and the testimony of the four subjects for this study attests to that the sands have shifted in recent years. As a result of the pressure, it might be argued that conditions are steering researchers to focus on their own individual trajectories.

The Context of the Research

The research that informs this study is drawn from four senior academics from the University of Cape Town. Two of these academics, Alex and Leila, work in the field of social anthropology. John and Peter are scholars in the field of education, sociology of knowledge and education policy. Pseudonyms are used for all four of the subjects. The subjects were selected because of the time they had spent in the institution, alongside the roles they play and continue to play in the Humanities Faculty of the University of Cape Town.

Important about these individuals and the reason they were selected for this international study is that they all had significant experience of operating in the higher education sector (See Table 1 above). Two of them were preparing for retirement as the interviews were being conducted and were serving or had just served significant periods of time in senior research administration positions where they were responsible for administering the innovations and the policies described above. They would have had a good understanding of the issues that were raised in the course of this study project. The other two academics were also senior members of staff and had experience of having to operate in and navigate their way through the new funding and publishing environment in the country. Of course recent history, as discussed earlier, has most definitely played a part in the decisions that were made.

Table 1 Participants and fields of study
Full size table

Interesting, also, about the academics, is that they worked in fields, anthropology and educational policy, where the tensions identified at the beginning of this work were and remain intense. In both fields, the most immediate questions preoccupying the work of the academics related to both identifying and engaging with the problems of justice, equality and social development. The history of apartheid is a critical factor for and in shaping the intellectual trajectories of scholars in the broad humanities in South Africa. As the interviews will show, the academics had to make conscious decisions about both how they would respond to these challenges and where they would place the products of their research. These questions also bore directly on how these fields would evolve. This particular issue would be a central consideration in the ways in which scholars would come to pose the question of the relationship of the local to the global. What would the cost of the switch from the local to the global be in terms of the relevance of their scholarship? What would they have to sacrifice with respect to the local in terms of shifting their gaze towards the global?

Findings

In this summary, the aim will be to extract the dominant themes emerging from these selected academic histories in two departments of the university. The data points for the study were 1993, 2003 and 2013.

In reflecting on the themes that emerged from the interviews, it is important to distinguish two general trends in the approaches which the respondents would take. The dominant response, especially evident in the testimony of three of the respondents, was an anxiety about the shift from the local to the international. This anxiety was characterized by a sense of loss of the value of working in the local space and the significance that working in the local space provided. There was also, however, as a second theme, some sense of the opportunity provided by beginning to participate in a wider global discussion. This sense, evident in different forms and intensities among the respondents, took the discussion to a nuanced place about the relationship between the local and the global.

For all the respondents there was a clear understanding of how the ground underneath them was shifting in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Alex (Transcript A) from Social Anthropology would say, the eighties were relatively easy to manage: “in the eighties we, you taught, and if you published, you were kind of patted on the back. You got promoted by getting your PhD, by getting a few more publications out”. This culture had shifted dramatically in the nineties. It was most clearly spelt out by Peter (Transcript P), one of the educational policy participants in the exercise. He would say:

I think the early — when I came here it was middle to late eighties, I guess until the early nineties the thrust, certainly in the school of education, was more interventionist/activist, if you like, so that publication was not under special pressure especially in the faculty as it was then constituted. That has shifted since the move through the nineties and become part of the larger Humanities faculty where the criteria are laid out and the expectations are more formal.

His colleague, John (Transcript J), would say that the nineties “was an awakening of the importance of getting higher degrees and publishing”.

Similar changes were taking place in social anthropology. Leila (Transcript L), one of the anthropologists, explained that she had had a sabbatical at Harvard in the nineties and when she came back to South Africa, she was penalized for publishing in local journals:

And so I made the choice when I came back to really focus on options in local journals. And so I got stuff into, er, a couple, ya, a couple of local journals — three, in fact, and um … Social Dynamics, Critical Arts and Anthropology Southern Africa which should you know, really, you know appropriate journals and I felt the irony is that Critical Arts is itself an international journal in the,… But when it came for the promotions application that year it was considered a local journal because it’s published out of South Africa.

As people who were classified white and who came out of a largely politically progressive position, the shift to a more international focus in the publishing culture of the country was to impact on them all in very direct ways. They all dealt with it, however, in their own way. John would argue that he had actually anticipated the shift himself:

It wasn’t the thing in our discipline to, to publish a lot but I became involved in our local journals … Perspectives in Education. And I published one or two pieces in there. Er, but, and this is where I think I’m a bit unusual, even in the eighties, um, I, er … was interested in international scholarship. So I probably published my first national publication, em, in nineteen eighty-five. Published by Margaret Archer, in a special edition of the Italian journal. Um, and that came about because I was looking to understand what was going on in education and the way I thought to do that was to go and meet people. So I got to a conference that Margaret Archer happened to be at and one thing led to the other. And then I had a sabbatical, um, later in the eighties and I went to the US where I met a whole lot of people. And they were truly generous and they, they invited me to their events and then invited me to contribute. So, um, so for me it was part of the natural order that that’s what you did …

John’s colleague, Peter, claimed that I “think it’s always been the same, in a sense that you publish where you think that you will get published”. The social anthropologists, Leila and Alex, decided that they would engage with it on their own terms. Leila said:

I was able to raise funds and bring people in that I wanted to talk to us, but my specific strategy was to get them here … As I wanted them to not just talk to me, me just talk to them, but I wanted them to talk to students, be part of our life here. That was a fantastic way of, of publishing, which meant that I was able to build dialogue with the best of the best internationally but the dialogue was here… and so the outcome of that was that we published our own book and I was very happy that City Press picked it up and they published that as a book containing social anthropology. Which is you know, um, been very widely downloaded and I’m … that it was published as an open source … the strategy then was, was to, to fundraise and, and bring people here as a conscious strategy to, to actually, you know, turn it around. I didn’t want to be the one travelling to New Orleans and in fact, I’ll tell you the story how I came to that decision, was I had a nine-month-old child and I took myself off to America to a meeting, which in that year was in New, New Orleans must have been two thousand and three, two thousand and four. … then had an eighteen-hour flight to Atlanta, change planes, and, you know, it’s an absolute nightmare. To speak for fifteen minutes …

The social anthropologists were particularly critical of the effects of the shift away from the local. Alex described the effects of the shift towards internationally recognized journals and the general climate in research. He observed that it counted against you to do too much administrative work. He also felt that, “[t]he North American style has kind of undermined the local thing and there has been a pressure”. In fact, “[t]he bars are now much higher and the consequences are that people are much more individualistic in their efforts to do research — each individual is kind of going out to make their own mark”. Alex commented:

It struck me most clearly in nineteen ninety-three when I went to an American Anthropological Association meeting. They have these big, thousands of people things, every year. First one I’d ever been to, and I was in a session which was a whole lot of Japanese anthropologists presenting really interesting papers, I’ve forgotten what the theme was. They were really well done but at the end of it I said where is the Japanese twist. These are really interesting, these are really good but I could have heard these at, they could have all come out of a good American university. There were a couple of those, there was nothing which made it feel as if it was Japanese … About Japan or about Japanese scholars. It was just; it was generic anthropology, it was American. It felt generic because they’d gone that route. But it was an American imposition, hegemonic way of doing things.

John in educational policy took a more positive view. He, more than the others, argued that it was necessary to work with and to take advantage of the international turn. For him it was the exposure and interfacing with the global that was important to be foregrounding and less the questions of managerialism. Making the argument, he felt that his field of Education research was limited in its outlook. He explained that while his department had a high proportion of international outputs and while this output had increased over the years as emphasis has shifted away from the practice of training teachers towards research, the research and publishing trend in the field was still angled towards what he called a ‘localising populism’. This localizing populism was influenced by the anti-apartheid struggle. On the positive side in this dynamic, he argued, the university was still, at this time, in the early nineties, thinking of competence. While the focus of much of the work was on the local, the opening up of South Africa by the mid-nineties helped researchers to see what others were doing elsewhere in the world, broadening the gaze. However, by the 2000s, the trend was towards outputs rather than substance. This trend was towards diversification away from the fixed gaze that had developed under the boycott before the nineties. Competitiveness as an institution has not been a motivating factor, but rather the drive for individuals to be significant to others even though they are still driven by their own positions. The emerging performance management criteria have led to a lot of anxiety and, as mentioned, a shift from competence to performance. These events have certainly led to academics publishing in high-impact journals.

Conflict Between the Individual and the Collective Good

Leila was dissatisfied with the pressures put on where you publish. She felt that publishing in local journals had led to discrimination when it came to promotion. One’s research score was adversely affected by publishing in local journals. She was considered not sufficiently active as a researcher to warrant promotion to full professor on the grounds that she had published — her promotion application report explicitly said — “In South African journals”. This, she said, was even if you are busy on a South African discussion. Furthermore, the question of open-source journals versus the cost of international access also suggests that the process had not been properly thought through. The pressure to publish internationally came with a price. That price was possibly a weakening of the local discussion and the undergraduate and graduate course content. Leila mentioned that there was a huge risk of the homogenization of higher education, which went counter to the building of a ‘southern theory’ in the field of social anthropology.

Trying to be World Class by holding on to the edges of discussions has its price - you can’t just quickly frame something in exactly the way that there’s a purchase for it … It’s very difficult to get money for people to come in. There’s money for us to go out and there’s money for us to participate … as equals, but we’re never really equals. In this light it is really important for us to begin to have the confidence to frame our own intellectual projects.

What emerges from our discussion is that performance-driven research incentives can act against the institution and the individual in many ways. As John says: “By the 2000s the trend was towards outputs rather than substance”. This suggests that while output might have increased in recent years, the overall quality of these research articles might have declined. Of course individuals might contradict this suggestion, but these individuals have been placed under unnecessary stress, as Alex says: “There has been a pressure … the bars are now much higher and the consequences are that people are much more individualistic in their efforts to do research — each individual is kind of going out to make their own mark”. This suggests that collective effort has been backgrounded in favour of a more individualistic contribution. When it comes to the actual effective running of the institution, it has (refer Alex) not been in your favour to take on too much administrative work. Here, we have a problem in that this points to a weakening in academic development, and this is not surprising as John says: “[E]mphasis has shifted away from the practice of training teachers towards research”. This highlights the possibility that research under pressure might result in the lack of quality substance and the shift from training teachers has most likely led to a weakening of the education system itself. This appears, going by recent commentary in local media, to be a thorn in the government’s plans to develop and grow the economy. It is of course also disturbing that this shift from competence to performance happened at a time when South Africa had begun to normalize the distribution of educational resources. Leila echoes a position that there has been a “weakening of the local discussion and the undergraduate and graduate course content”, which must also have consequences for the quality of the research output.

As for a shift, referred to by Leila, that has (refer also to Alex’s input) “kind of undermined the local thing”. We are possibly faced with the situation that we are not acutely aware of the consequences of the very process of change that we are part of. Again we have focused on the individual, possibly at the expense of the collective good. In South Africa this parallels the choices made at the national level economically and politically where neo-liberalism has forced the country to make choices which are not always in the interests of the South African people. The homogenization of higher education, as mentioned by Leila has certainly undermined our capacity of “building a ‘southern theory’ in the field of social anthropology”. In terms of our own liberation from the apartheid past this suggests in some sense a loss of vision as to how to develop a new more inclusive politics.

Conclusion: Consequences for the Individual Researcher

How does one make sense of the impact of the shift in the sands beneath the South African academic’s feet? While it is possibly true that academics publish where they think they can get published, the weight of the international discourse on rankings and managerialism might have pushed South African academics towards an increased sensitivity to bibliometrics, citation indices and the compulsion to publish in what are perceived to be international journals. But has this, speaking categorically, been a bad thing?

What is also reported elsewhere is (Tongai, 2013, para 29) “[n]ot everyone agrees that incentives for academics drive institutional success”. According to Professor Macleod (refer Tongai, 2013, para 31), the incentives system is counter-productive in terms of scholarship as researchers are tempted to, “cut up the research in as thin slices as possible in order to get the maximum number of articles published”. These incentives might also, according to Professor Macleod, discourage collaboration and team research. She concludes (refer Tongai, 2013, para 32): “The incentive system is a blunt instrument that serves the purposes of increasing university income rather than supporting scholarship and knowledge production in South Africa”. For many, this is the kind of managerialism that has emerged elsewhere in the world.

Leila is dissatisfied with the pressure put on a researcher as to where they should publish. She says that, “[l]ocal publishing has led to discrimination when it comes to promotion re: research score”. Those who have followed the university guidelines might have advanced themselves but undermined the development of a local discussion. There has, according to Peter “been a shift from interventionist/activist to more formal expectations”. In contrast, it appears to Peter that, “[i]n the past 20 years professional work for the government has increased but is unacknowledged compared with the academic work”. This is an important and under-explored feature of South African research. While it is not clear, in terms of the volume of this kind of work, whether Peter is correct or not, the more salient point is that bespoke research for the state continues even as the demand to publish internationally has shifted the sands in individuals’ research and publication choices.

In making sense of the new environment, whilst this study might not be able to definitively describe the pros and cons of these trends, it does suggest that accountability moves within the university which steer academics to the global arena might have contributed towards distinct forms of what one might call loss. This loss is the dilution of the sense of urgency that was evident when the South African higher education system entered its fourth phase. That fourth phase was characterized by substantial evidence of collective effort behind and in concert around the country’s most pressing questions. What has emerged from the discussion with the four South African academics is that the new incentive and reward system in the country, in favouring the academic who is geared towards the global arena, has had the effect of producing new atomized scholarship. In foregrounding individual advancement, through emphasizing individual outputs and individual citations, much of the South African work is sacrificing the urgency and relevance of the local.

In bringing this assessment to a close, it may easily be concluded that the business model imposed on the university by the DoHET has not been entirely beneficial for the kind of research output that the country has produced, especially in the humanities. Such a conclusion, however, would be too simplistic. Many South African researchers, according to the interviewees, have also learnt to participate in the global research arena. It is how we shift between the local and the global with respect to performance management criteria that remains contested. When we allow a situation to develop where South Africans are unable to promote the type of research that can assist us here in South Africa that the new research reward system could be said to be unquestionably negative. Also, if the advancement of the individual takes priority over the collective, we are likely not to develop the knowledge and to lose the skills that encourage collaboration and the need to solve problems. South Africa faces an avalanche of social and educational challenges and these problems need urgently to be discussed and researched at a local level and in the most accessible language available. This has undoubtedly led to tension and competition between colleagues in their attempt to raise the bar — trends that often run counter to the need for social responsibility and professional work to aid government, as well as good administration in the universities. While South Africa’s recent political history, especially the post-apartheid government’s project to transform education and the social landscape, has impacted on the kind of decisions academics make about what they publish and where, the incorporation of the country into the global environment has produced new pressures for academics. There has been a definite shift from competence to performance.

However, while it is important to be clear-eyed about this, the question of how to navigate the new circumstances is what is most crucially required to be faced now. The argument must be confronted that the new globalized conditions are unlikely to dissipate or even to become more sensitive to the knowledge demands of countries in the south in the near future. It is highly unlikely that the urgency of the issues in the countries which constitute the south, on their own terms, will become easily apparent to global journals which will in turn willingly devote both their attention and their interest to what southern countries might contribute to global knowledge. In the short and immediate term, it would seem then that academics in the south need to be operating in much more strategic ways in engaging the new global conditions. It is here that scholars such as Leila clearly have much to contribute. What they are talking about is how to begin changing the conditions through which the local is brought into much clearer perspective in the global. Leila’s approach is to bring the global to the local and through collaborations to begin developing the strategies for showing how and why what is perceived to be local knowledge has to be given more serious attention in the global discussion. That the international discourse is so ideologically biased towards its own structures of power and hegemony is a structural reality that must be understood and engaged with strategically. It would seem, and this is the significance of the second trend emerging in South Africa, that dealing with it through the tactic of non-engagement, that is by focusing strictly on the local, has too many of its own localized dangers. The most critical of these, and this is what both Leila and John quickly recognized, is that the quality of the local discussion by itself was not good enough. It needed to be in a robust engagement with the international discussion. South Africans needed the interlocutory dynamic of their own specific insights with the critical lessons of the global discussion to be able to both give and take to the broader discussion. It is the management of this dynamic, however, that requires intense reflection— reflection on who to make links with, where to publish and, most critically, how to frame and conduct the discussions when they do happen. It would seem that this is a discussion that South Africans consciously now need to be applying their minds to. They cannot go it alone. This is a self-defeating exercise. They cannot, also, lose their identity and the specificity of their challenges and affordances in the generalized anonymity of a global discussion. It is this that now needs attention.

Notes

  1. 1

    The apartheid government classified the South African population into four main groups, white, African, coloured and Indian. These classifications have largely been retained for redress purposes by the post-apartheid government. During the anti-apartheid struggle, the liberation movement launched a campaign to develop what it called a non-racial approach to race and began to use the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ as political rather than racial designations. ‘Black’ was an inclusive term of people classified ‘African’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’. The terms are used inconsistently in the current period.

  2. 2

    These are, in South African parlance, either the ‘townships’ of the apartheid era for people designated as ‘African’, or the informal settlements established by poor people themselves.