Karl von Holdt

University of the Witwatersrand | wits · Society Work and Development Inst

This volume identifies South Africa as the birthplace of the concept of public sociology, popularized globally by Michael Burawoy, and charts the contrasting trajectories of ‘public sociology’ and ‘critically engaged sociology’ as found in South Africa. The focus is on researchers and research conducted at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (...

This chapter provides an overview of the research trajectory of the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) and how this was shaped by its commitment to supporting the labour movement in particular and South Africa’s liberation movement and social movements in general. The chapter maps out the institute’s research traditions as they evolved fro...

The idea of public sociology in its global form was inspired by sociological practice in South Africa, conceptualized as ‘critical engagement’, when the US sociologist Michael Burawoy visited the country in the 1990s. This volume explores the trajectory of critical engagement before and after Burawoy’s visit, comparing this to the trajectory of ‘pu...

This paper holds together biographical materials, field analysis, position-taking preferences, and Bourdieu's influence. A late adopter of the bourdieusian toolbox, the author explains his attempt to confront South African reality with Bourdieu's thought rather than the other way around, also trying to establish the unconscious determinants behind...

The concept of a movement landscape is used to analyse continuities and changes in popular mobilization since the end of formal apartheid. Focusing on four different episodes of protest since 1997, the article examines their relationship to the ANC movement and traditions, and their organizational forms. It finds a general theme of fluid and epheme...

The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current...

Violence and democracy are generally treated as antithetical. However, this article argues for the concept of violent democracy using the South African case to explore the ways in which violence and democracy may be mutually constitutive in countries of the global South, with their particular histories of violence, power, inequality and contestatio...

In this article, the author argues that socially engaged sociology cannot be understood as a practice isolated in the quadrant of 'public sociology' as suggested by Michael Burawoy's organization of sociology into four distinct quadrants but that it is closely associated with critical policy sociology as well as critical professional sociology. The...

South Africa is torn between the persistence of an exclusionary socioeconomic structure marked by deep poverty and extreme inequality on the one hand, and on the other the symbolic and institutional rupture presented by the transition to democracy. This relationship produces a highly unstable social order in which intra-elite conflict and violence...

This article uses the high levels of collective violence associated with contentious politics in South Africa as a prism through which to explore the confrontation between a sociology of the West, represented by Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, and a sociology of the colonial and postcolonial South, represented by Fanon’s theory of revolutio...

EvansIvan. Cultures of Violence. Lynching and radical killing in South Africa and the American South. Manchester University Press, Manchester [etc.]2009. x, 310 pp. £65.00 - Volume 56 Issue 1 - Karl von Holdt

This article undertakes a concrete analysis of the workings of the post-apartheid South African state bureaucracy, within the state hospitals and provincial health departments, in an effort to understand the reasons for its poor functioning. The research points to a contradictory set of rationales shaping the workings of the bureaucracy, which may...

Strikes were frequently accompanied by violence during the 1980s in South Africa. Strikers were regularly beaten, arrested and shot by the police. Strike breakers were intimidated, beaten and sometimes murdered by striking workers. Labour analysts ascribed the high levels of worker violence to the conditions under which trade unions organised and e...

Purpose Is labour's decline permanent, or is it merely a temporary weakening, as Beverley Silver suggests in her recent book, as the labour movement is unmade and remade in different locations and at different times? The article aims to examine this question in South Africa, one of the newly industrialised countries of the 1960s and 1970s, now larg...

In the context of renewed international debates about the significance of social movement unionism, this article undertakes a detailed analysis of social movement unionism in a South African steelworks. The study investigates the importance to union formation of political, racial, migrant and ethnic identities forged beyond the workplace, and asses...