There is consensus in the development communication field about community participation being a holistic approach required to address social development challenges. Participatory development, also known as another development, is considered invaluable in the social change process. While participatory principles have enjoyed increasing influence over the work of development organisations, there is still confusion as to what participation really is and how it must be applied as an approach to social change. As a result, development in (marginalized) communities has remained what I would call a Sisyphean task despite tremendous funding and effort that is being put towards development. This study is motivated by three factors relating to the practical and theoretical issues characterising participation. First is the acknowledged lack of a consistent definition as well as inconsistencies characterising the application of participation. The second factor is the contention that participation has remained under theorised and the third is what can be arguably conceived as the influence of stakeholder theory on development communication discourse. The focus of this study is how a theory commonly used in the strategic communication field, the stakeholder theory, applies to deliberate development communication efforts, particularly how the theory sheds light on the concept of participation. It introduces and examines the relevance of Edward Freeman‘s (1984) stakeholder theory in defining and applying participation in social change initiatives. Three development agents namely OneVoice South Africa (OVSA), The Valley Trust (TVT) and Drama for Aids Education (DramAidE) are used as a case study of the concept of participation. The study begins with a critical exploration of the complex participatory communication for social change narrative discussing key ontological and epistemological assumptions as well as a pastiche of approaches often reified as participation. It goes on to present a comprehensive review of the stakeholder theory and its critique, followed by an exploration of how the three development agents develop, implement and manage their respective participatory programmes. It concludes by applying stakeholder theory to the analysis of these programmes to determine whether the theory can be conceived as an accurate descriptive tool of the participation process and if its normative tenets are valid to the process. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

Using a qualitative and interpretive approach, this research focuses on the training and support needs of crisis interventionists volunteering at an organisation for the abused. This research developed out of a need identified by the board for recommendations to be made in order to compile a new training manual as well as to explore and improve the support services offered to volunteers at the organisation. The research used a thorough examination of the current literature available dealing with crisis intervention and intimate partner violence both nationally and internationally to provide a framework and standard for all recommendations. This was then supplemented with a participatory and interpretive approach to understand the experiences of the crisis interventionists themselves currently volunteering at the organisation. The major themes that emerged from the data included an understanding of the current training process, the impact of volunteering for the desk, the impact and importance of organisational culture and the organisation and self care techniques used by the volunteers. These were then interpreted in terms of their relevance to the training and support needs of the volunteers looking specifically at the training process to ensure an ideological shift and information retention as well as explore supportive services that would be the most beneficial and accessible to the volunteer. The research was then able to provide the most appropriate recommendations for the organisation going forward. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

In this exploratory study, several conditions are identified as facilitative to a mandate of accountability to the welfare service users premised on a social process of cooperative inquiry. Firstly, constructive pressure from an extraneous surveillance power is necessary to instigate the structural inclusion of the welfare service users, without which the prevalent power asymmetry between the welfare service users and the professional service providers cannot be easily rocked. Secondly, enhanced social encounter and sustained interaction between the welfare service users and the service providers is the basis for emergent trust and alliance facilitative to an eventual power sharing that a mandate of accountability to the welfare service users demands. Thirdly, an ideological allegiance to the liberatory orientation of social work professionalism is imperative to nurturing the service providers' political commitment to the course of partnership with the service-using principal that a mandate of accountability to them requires. Realization of the service providers' accountability to the welfare service users invariably lies in the dialectic interaction between managerialism and professionalism. / Meanwhile, the study identifies different manifestation of the user involvement rhetoric between service units serving the elderly and the disabled persons (the "frail" group) and those serving clienteles with psychosocial or moral deficiency (the "deviant" group). It is the contention of this thesis that the greater strength and wider scope of user involvement as featured in the institutional structure of service units in the "frail" group does not necessarily correspond to a state of power symmetry that allows authentic argumentation between the professional service providers and the welfare service users in their discursive encounter. Given the multifarious strategies enabling the service providers to exert control over the welfare service users, the service providers' attitude in their relationship with the welfare service users is crucial for effecting change in the prevailing power position of the welfare service users. Materialization of a mandate of accountability to the welfare service users is hence premised on the prevalence of a cultural code that can embrace a more egalitarian relationship with the welfare service users among the service providers. / The last decades have seen a wide-reaching quest for reforms in the Hong Kong public sector. Among the multifarious managerial changes imposed on the Hong Kong welfare sector, the Service Performance Monitoring System instigated in 1999 embraces the irrefutable rhetoric of accountability that subjugates welfare service units in Hong Kong to a renewed mandate of managerial control premised on performance measurement and the enhanced involvement of the welfare service users. It is this policy context that revitalizes the user participation ethos that the profession of social work has always been supporting. By the mixed methodology of survey and case study, the research on which this thesis is based endeavours to locate the structural properties of the commonly incepted user involvement mechanism among the Hong Kong welfare service units, and to discern the processual dynamics in the discursive space enabled by the structural inclusion of the welfare service users. This is meant to advance our understanding on the ways by which user involvement enables a mandate of accountability premised on a cooperative inquiry with the welfare service users. / The study identifies a generally limited strength and scope in the user involvement initiatives adopted by the welfare service units. The discursive encounter between the service-using principal and the service-providing agent was also fused with tension. The tension was manifested in the service providers' unease at the accountability discourse, which legitimized the authority of the welfare service users in the management structure of the service units. In a service environment where the managerial discourse and the professional discourse used to compete for dominance, both the managerialist and professional tenets were employed by the service-providing informants to confront the tension and neutralize the implied power of the welfare service users, however meager it was. Whilst structural inclusion of the service users is a necessary condition for tackling the management risk arising from necessary entrustment to the service-providing agent, this thesis contends that structural re-engineering by itself is insufficient to ensure the advancement of the service-using principal's influence in their accountability relationship with the professional service providers. / Leung Tse Fong, Terry. / "November 2005." / Adviser: Bong-ho Mok. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4336. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-315). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

An increasingly popular way for global citizens to contribute to communities around the world is through international volunteering. In tandem with this growing trend, academic research in the field has increased to explore the goals, motivations, and impacts of international service on volunteers, host communities, and volunteer-sending organizations. One of the larger gaps in our understanding of global civic engagement though is the specifics of how and why, as well as the overall impact of international service on, host organizations that seek and/or accept international volunteers. Using an exploratory research design to collect and analyze survey data and open-ended email inquiry responses from almost 250 organizational representatives in 50+ countries, this dissertation expands the breadth and depth of knowledge on the relationship between host organizations and international volunteers. Findings include a broad and varied range of potential motivations for hosting international volunteers, from direct benefits to the host organization like leveraging organizational capacity to benefits extended to the broader community and volunteers themselves such as providing opportunities for cross-cultural interaction. In addition, host organization characteristics and opinions were compared between two global regions - Africa and Asia - and statistically significant relationships identified between characteristics and opinions of host organizations and their reported satisfaction with international volunteers. This study contributes new data on and from organizations that host international volunteers. Research findings also support and expand the field's understanding of international volunteer engagement as it relates specifically to organizational capacity and social capital theory.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2001.