The South African health system consists of partly privatized and partly public health care. It is the latter that is responsible for the wellbeing of the majority of the South African population. It is also the latter however that faces multiple challenges. Of these are challenges relating to working hours, staff to patient ratio, and burnout, as well as the availability of resources / equipment; supervision and training and the experiences of bullying. Moreover, research shows that while the working conditions / contexts as well as the availability of supervision that junior healthcare professionals work in and have access to has been studied extensively in both Northern and Southern literature; the bullying experienced by junior doctors and other junior health professionals have been extensively studied in Western literature with very little being done to study this phenomenon. Further, very little has been done to study questions pertaining to the mechanisms of laying complaints about these challenges in the South. Against this background, the thesis was concerned to explore experiences and perceptions of laying complaints to supervisors and the largest health regulatory body in South Africa, the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA). The thesis used semi-structured interviews to interview six junior healthcare professionals who are registered and thus regulated by the HPCSA in South Africa and who are in the process of or who have recently completed their compulsory year/s of internship / community service in any public hospital in South Africa. This was done in order to explore their accounts and perceptions of challenges and complaints mechanisms pertaining to these challenges in their first postgraduate years. The public health system in South Africa is still rife with many challenges. My research found that according to their own accounts, junior healthcare workers encounter these as direct challenges in their everyday experience. They bear the brunt of these by having to deal with major burnout associated with long working hours and understaffing. It also shows that their account is that there is a lack of much needed resources and equipment and that challenges associated with this often have dire consequences for both them and their patients. Further, my research showed that they continue to feel that they are not being properly trained and supervised and that they do indeed face many challenges relating to bullying behavior by senior health professionals. Connected to this, my research showed that despite being aware of the complaints mechanisms in place, these junior healthcare workers often have had negative experiences with laying complaints and / or have negative perceptions about complaint mechanisms such as their supervisors and the HPCSA. In sum, the findings show that these challenges sustain and exacerbate each other in a vicious cycle in South Africa. While the sample used in this research was based in issues of access and availability and is not representative, these patterns and themes emerged consistently and thus warrant further investigation both in themselves and as possibly representative of what is happening in the medical profession in South Africa.

Includes bibliographical references. / South Africa has a notoriously inefficient public schooling system. Levels of educational attainment and achievement are low given the large amount of resources devoted to schools. Improving student outcomes requires the examination of both family-back ground factors such as parental education and household income, as well as school-level factors such as class size and teacher quality. The influences of socio-economic status and of race also need to be considered. This dissertation builds on the work of Case and Deaton, Van der Berg and others, using data from the Cape Area Panel study.

This study contributes to the understanding of how young adults living in Cape Town's townships experience poverty and unemployment in neighborhoods where both are prevalent. Unemployment is acknowledged to be a fundamental problem for township dwellers and yet the psychological repercussions on individuals in these communities remain largely understudied. While young people are the majority of South Africa's population, their voices frequently go unheard even with regards to issues that unduly affect them. In the last decade, a growing body of literature emerged using qualitative methods to address this concern. Quantitative analysis has shown that young adults - specifically African youth - bear the brunt of unemployment but research has yet to look closely at how unemployment shapes their expectations, attitudes and decision making. This research examines the effects of unemployment felt on an individual, psychological level as well as the contextual consequences of living in a neighborhood severely demoralized by widespread unemployment. Interviews with twenty youth between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two suggest that regardless of gender, age and class, (at least within the working class township community) young people are concerned with unemployment, which is often equated with poverty. In sharp contrast to the well-researched youth of the antiapartheid struggle whose lives were altered dramatically by the turbulence of those decades, these findings show that today's young adults in Cape Town's townships are ordinary young people growing up under particularly difficult circumstances, and with varying ability to mitigate the trials of their social worlds. Young adults in this sample are 'ordinary', in that when individually consulted, they cannot be categorized as a homogenous group. They have bold ideas about their future but their attention is often focused on the immediate. There are those who are ambitious and put their goals for personal success above all else. There are others who have high hopes but struggle both with their own decision making, and obstacles that set them back. Some are better-connected, some are more astute, and some are more at ease with their circumstances, willing to maintain the status quo rather than strive towards an abstract goal. Having little guidance from adults their influences are largely derived from their peer group, which emphasizes material culture and fitting in. Most believe in the importance of making 'good decisions' and aim to succeed but are easily frustrated by difficulties. They value the idea of education but do not always attend school or push themselves to excel. Even those who have achieved higher education sometimes question its merit in light of their disappointment in the job market. Despite assertions that there are 'no jobs' one finds that there are jobs but those available are less attractive when compared to the aspirations of these township youth. Their expected jobs vary with the level of education they have achieved however all desire employment outside of manual labor. This research shows that youth feel they can shape their futures but simultaneously expect their environment to hamper success. Success is largely viewed as a job or home that is 'better' than their parents, further distancing them from apartheid to which they feel no connection despite the lasting effects these policies have on the neighborhoods and institutions which continue to impair young people's growth. More specifically, despite aspirations for 'real' jobs in the formal market, the majority have ambivalent ideas for achieving these outcomes. Without examples of neighbors who have attained upward mobility, or access to information regarding opportunities outside of the township some youth's perseverance is stunted. The psychosocial implications of this issue have largely been ignored in South Africa. These interviews shed light on how the township environment interacts with and influences the decisions and attitudes of young adults. On one level, its isolation hinders communication regarding jobs, training or opportunities. In a social sense, the ubiquitous nature of unemployment stifles any sense of urgency, and the optimism of youth is often overshadowed by a sense of melancholy. There is a sense of defeat inhibiting the environment that affects young lives and limits their potential.

The following study highlights the debates around Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and explores to what extent the engagement of companies is contributing to development. This study focuses on one major company and its developmental activities in the Western Cape. The research is based on a main concern with the role of CSR in impoverished communities and whether CSR is contributing to development. Using a case study approach, semi-structured interviews as well as document analysis and observation have been conducted in order to achieve the research objectives.

Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation investigates the relationships between domestic workers and employers, as reported by employers, concentrating on food provision as a central dimension. It applies anthropological and sociological approaches that include 10 focus group discussions, 171 completed questionnaires (open- and closed-answer questions) and 10 home observation sessions. The employer sample group is almost exclusively white, middle class, female, English-speaking, tertiary educated residents of Cape Town, South Africa. The research starts from the premise that domestic employment Is an illuminating sphere for analysing the intersection between race, class and gender at the present time in South Africa. It argues that, through an examination of the domestic worker employment relationship, particularly when viewed through the lens of food provision, It becomes possible to judge the extent to which these relationships have changed since the end of apartheid. The research shows that, while a proportion of individual relationships have changed in positive ways, many remain determined by the habituated norms and codes of apartheid-era employment. The study found that the relationship is characterised by contradictions in the attitudes and behaviour of employers, exacerbated by ambiguous communication and employer discomfort and feelings of guilt about past, and present, inequalities. Employer unease and discomfort were particularly evident in the company of peers and in relation to the question of employer responsibility towards workers. The study also found that age and income influenced employer attitudes.

This thesis begins to explore the phenomenon, in the South African education system, of students who have sex with teachers. The study provides a more nuanced understanding of student-teacher sexual relationships, reporting on empirical research which explores the prevalence of the phenomenon, the circumstances in which it occurs and students' opinions. In doing so, this research contributes to a more complete picture of student-teacher sexual relationships, exploring a plurality of viewpoints, in order to inform policy and interventions.

Includes bibliographical references (p.98-106). / The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that there is a strong correlation between leadership, management and thriving socio-economically disadvantaged schools in the Western Cape. This study is a case study of 15 schools in mostly socio-economically disadvantaged areas of the Western Cape. This was a qualitative study that included a combination of field work, interviews, literature and document reviews and desktop analysis.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-123). / With the end of apartheid, South Africa underwent a political and economic transition, where democracy coincided with the country's insertion into the global political economy. Consequently, post-apartheid South Africa has come to mirror the global economic transition toward neo-liberalism. This shift has been impelled by international and national forces, with the ideological pervasiveness captured in national and local policy papers. The policy and empirical expressions of this ideology have emerged as particularly stark in South African water distribution, with the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry implementing intensified practices of cost-recovery to allow local government to become financially sustainable. At the conceptual level of the paper the 'naturalisation of water commodification' serves as the framework through which privatization, commercialisation and cost-recovery are examined. The policy of cost-recovery has been accompanied by harsh punitive measures, including water disconnection and eviction due to non-payment. This has been widely challenged with critics arguing that there exists a fundamental problem of affordability. This tension has come to be reflected within the policy environment, as punitive measures have been gradually replaced by pro-poor equity measures. However, these continue to be located within a larger cost-recovery framework.

Most international and local (South African) research on housing examine housing tenure in terms of static categories, - i.e. does someone own or rent their accommodation - without capturing either the dynamics of how people occupy housing or the complexities that arise when, for example, someone might rent accommodation while owning a house elsewhere. Most censuses and surveys simply ask whether the household living in a sampled house (or apartment, etc) currently rents or owns that house. I find access to housing to be a better analytical category than tenure arguing that renting and owner occupier housing are not exclusive categories, and can co-exist, and that additional categories should be identified.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the Global South that work in development are said to operate autonomously from their governments yet their very existence depends largely on dominant bureaucratic bodies - mostly Northern influencers. Indeed, many Southern NGOs are dissatisfied with the sector due to these structural and institutional forces that can be exclusionary, dominating and restricting to their autonomy, affecting the organization's sustainability as leaders within their civil societies. I have ventured to explore how one Southern NGO contends with such an environment. Through conducting an ethnography on Social Transformation and Empowerment Projects (STEPS), a nonprofit documentary production company based in Cape Town, South Africa, I have explored how they navigate within these confines. I have investigated what tacit rules they adhere to in order to remain operational in the sector while also exploring what other rules they attempt to subvert in order to emancipate themselves from these structural forces. This dissertation investigates power struggles in line with Foucault's (1980) theoretical framing on how power exists everywhere and in everything. This study also employs Bourdieu's (1977) concept of habitus and Vigh's (2009) utilization of the concept of navigation as ways to gain a deeper introspection into how these particular practitioners negotiate their positionality within development. Overall, I argue that central to how STEPS navigate the terrain of a contentious development field rest primarily in key decision-makers within the organization. The nature of these practitioners as informed by their life histories has created dispositions that not only inform their agency as individuals but also transfer to their organization (culture, structure, vision, ideologies, ambition). Despite external structures that can also act as roadblocks or allies in actions, choices and agency, the habitus of these prominent figures within the organization are key to actions of the collective when presented with negative or positive structural forces.