University of the Witwatersrand Discipline of Psychology MASTERS RESEARCH REPORT / This study conducted a thematic content analysis qualitative methods approach to explore the perceptions of the “Impact of the 2012 Marikana labour unrest on labour and industrial relations in South Africa”. Perceptions of industrial relations stakeholder role efficacy; causes and consequences of labour-management conflict, intra-union conflict and inter-union conflict are discussed. Economic, political, sociological factors as well as the influence of group dynamics are discussed to frame the impact of the 2012 Marikana incident on labour and industrial relations in South Africa.

M.Com. (Leadership in Performance and Change) / In August 2012 the South African mining industry was the focus of attention due to an illegal strike at Lonmin Platinum mine that resulted in the police shooting striking employees on 16 August 2012. Thirty-four employees lost their lives on that day. An additional ten people died in violent protests in the build-up to the main shooting incident. This strike period has become widely known as ‘Marikana’. This historical incident illustrates how a single incident within an organisation can have an impact at various levels and affect multiple stakeholders. The main objective of this study was to identify the effect that the Marikana mining incident had on Lonmin (the organisation) and its main stakeholders as well as to identify the effect the stakeholders and Lonmin had on each other. In order to reach these objectives an historical timeline of the sequence of events surrounding the Marikana incident was constructed. The main stakeholders involved in the Marikana incident were then identified, and the relationships and the relative strengths between these stakeholders were mapped. The methodology used in the study was Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) as applied by Franzosi (2010). In particular, the content from English newspaper articles sourced from South Africa and England relating to the Marikana mining incident for the period 1 to 24 August 2012 were reviewed, coded and analysed. All relevant data from the articles were recorded in a manual database, coded according to the semantic triplet of ‘actors’, ‘actions’ and ‘subjects’ (S-V-O) (Franzosi, 1989) and analysed based on QNA principles (Franzosi, 2010). First, a sequence analysis was conducted, identifying the roles (consequences) that the respective actors (stakeholders and subgroupings of stakeholders) enacted as well as the order in which they unfolded. The analysis was used to produce a series of network graphs to visually depict the sequence of events and the respective effects of the sequencing of these events. These graphs take the form of stake maps and visually tell the story of how events unfolded and the effects of these events on all the actors involved ...

This thesis aims to open up the realm of what counts as political in the context of the Marikana strikes and subsequent massacre. It does primarily by taking into account the social, political and cultural context of Mpondo workers on the mines. Many narrow Marxist and liberal frameworks have circumscribed the conception of the ‘modern’ and the ‘political’ so much so that political organisation which falls outside of this conceptualisation is often regarded as ‘backward’ or ‘archaic’. It will provide an examination of the history, culture and custom of men, who have, for almost a hundred years migrated back and forth between South African mines and Mpondoland. This not only reveals differing modes of organising and engaging in political action, but also that the praxis of democracy takes many forms, some of which are different and opposed to what counts as democratic in Western liberal democracy. By considering what I argue, following some of the insights from the Subaltern Studies collective in India, to be a subaltern sphere of politics and history, it is possible to better understand the way workers organised and acted. The thesis also argues that most labour and nationalist historiography has been silent on the political contributions of women because of how Marxist/liberal analysis frames struggles through disciplined notions of work and resistance. Rather than objectifying workers as representatives of a homogenous and universal class of people devoid of context, the thesis has linked ‘the worker’ to the community from which s/he comes and community specific struggles, which are supported and sustained, often, by the parallel struggles of women in the community.