Magister Educationis - Med / Since the 1980s several different forms of privatisation had been introduced into the South African educational system by the De Lange Commission. Since the 1990s a raft of neoliberal policies has been implemented under the banner of "educational transformation" by the post-apartheid state. This qualitative exploration will apply a critical policy analysis approach to analyse the impact of neoliberalism on post-apartheid education policy discourse in the public schooling system in South Africa from a historical, social and critical perspective. More specifically, I will apply the insights of critical education theory to interrogate the impact of the neoliberal orthodoxy and its concomitant values on the public schooling system with regard to the delivery of accessible, quality public schooling in post-apartheid South Africa.

This thesis firstly explores the process and effects of social dialogue in the context of informal home-based workers in Gujarat, India, and secondly the applicability of Dryzek’s theory of discourse democracy on this case study. In doing this, the study investigates the potential of social dialogue and discourse democracy to work as instruments for improving the social and economic situation of the workers. The case study consists of how the organisation and trade union Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) communicate with influential actors in order to improve the social and economic situation of the informal home-based workers. The material is gathered through interviews with four organisers at SEWA, and observations made when visiting three areas of home-based workers. The empirical results are presented in a chapter demonstrating the process of social dialogue and its effect on the workers situation in this particular context. The second part of the results is a discussion where the theoretical framework, consisting of Dryzek’s discourse democracy and the critique of Habermas’s deliberative democracy that structure his theory, and the empirical findings are scrutinised in relation to each other; by discussing traits of the theories in connection to the case study. The thesis concludes that there are similarities between social dialogue in this case and the theory of discourse democracy, but the theory cannot wholly be used to conceptualise social dialogue. It demonstrated the importance of the communicative decision-making to admit a wide variety of kinds of communication and to involve an active civil society with support in the constitutional framework for improving the social and economic situation of the workers. However, it also indicates that other practices than communicative ones are necessary in this struggle.