From the Belly of the Beast, the Monsters We Can Create from the Zombies and the Hyenas amongst us!
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34190/ecmlg.20.1.3117Keywords:
The monsters you made, Leadership and Governance, Walter Sisulu University, Fees Must Fall Movement, The Belly of the beastAbstract
The purpose of this article is to address what has always been discussed as the three main elements of the social world. That is, the structure, culture and agency in the management, leadership and governance systems in university education. Such elements, as analytically distinct, arise from the assumptions that their roles, respectively, are values free exercise, asocial, apolitical and, therefore, neutral. Citing a particular case that has been a subject of deep debates and extensive conversations in previous ECMLG 2021, ECMLG 2022 and as part one of ECMLG 2024, this paper subjects, as an immanent critique, the claims that the management of organisations’ resources, which generally make for the interface between senior management and the formal governance of the organisation, with all things being equal, can make for forms of efficiency and effectiveness in organisational and management systems. With the title of the paper, From the belly of the beast, the monsters we can create from the zombies and the hyenas amongst us, the paper thus adopts a disruptive and transgressive stance about what can always appear as the structural and cultural norms. As such, the paper will argue, by drawing from the post-modernist theories, for example, the social realist theory as anchored on the critical realist philosophy, that it takes the properties and powers both of the knowledge and knower structures for the ideal of university education as the public good, as the case will illustrate, to be a realist reality. By means of a social realist methodology, research data was drawn from organizational records, which was then subjected to critical discourse analysis for identifying the structural mechanisms that could generate the crisis events and processes, and further to how the latter could be experienced and observed over time. Such a methodology therefore foregrounds the value of morphogenesis/morphostasis in a social realist oriented project. Based on what ought to be the theory-methodology-practical program chain, the value of the article is, in itself, and for generalised contexts, thus related to what ought to lie behind the shine of leadership practices, of the management systems, and of the governance structures. That refers to the case of what can be the three headed monstrous situations, and further to the value of the practices as the nexus of research and development, of policy and implementation, and of strategy and leadership.