Sociology In South Africa

This book is the first comprehensive account of the history and current state of South African sociology. Providing a holistic picture of the subject both as it is taught in universities and as a field of research, it reveals the trajectories of a discipline in a challenging socio-political context. With the support of historical and scientometric data, it demonstrates how the changing political situation, from colonialism to apartheid to democracy, has influenced the nature, direction and foci of sociological research in the country. The author shows how, during the apartheid era, sociology was professionally fragmented and divided along language and race lines. It was, however, able to flourish with the advent of democracy in 1994 and has become a unique academic movement. This insightful work will appeal to students and scholars of the social sciences, and all those interested in the history and society of South Africa.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Sociology: A comprehensive South African Introduction provides a comprehensive introduction to the sociological theories and themes commonly taught in undergraduate courses

This concise, accessibly written book addresses fundamental sociological questions. What is Sociology? uses a discussion of three major sociological theories - Marxism, functionalism, and symbolic interactionisms - to address major issues in the field. In short, this book introduces its readers to the surprising, demanding, often magical world of sociological enquiry.

"This book explains why nearly 30 years after the transition to democracy, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupiers as threats to the government's housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as "disorderly" threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do governments decide when to evict, and conversely, when to tolerate? These decisions are not made in a vacuum but instead require an analysis that expands what we typically call "the state." This book argues that the state does not simply "see" occupations, as if they were a feature of the natural landscape. Rather, occupiers collectively project themselves to government actors, affecting how they are seen. But residents are not only seen; they also see, which shapes how they organize themselves. When residents see the state as an antagonist, they tend to unify under a single leadership; but when they see it as a potential ally, they often remain atomized as if they were individual customers. The unity in the former case projects an orderly population, less likely to be evicted; but the fragmentation in the latter case projects a disorderly mass, serving to legitimate eviction rulings"--

Focusing on the South African city of Durban, Security in the Bubble looks at spatialized security practices, engaging with strategies and dilemmas of urban security governance in cities around the world. While apartheid was spatial governance at its most brutal, postapartheid South African cities have tried to reinvent space, using it as a “positive” technique of governance. Christine Hentschel traces the contours of two emerging urban regimes of governing security in contemporary Durban: handsome space and instant space. Handsome space is about aesthetic and affective communication as means to making places safe. Instant space, on the other hand, addresses the crime-related personal “navigation” systems employed by urban residents whenever they circulate through the city. While handsome space embraces the powers of attraction, instant space operates through the powers of fleeing. In both regimes, security is conceived not as a public good but as a situational experience that can. No longer reducible to the after-pains of racial apartheid, this city’s fragmentation is now better conceptualized, according to Hentschel, as a heterogeneous ensemble of bubbles of imagined safety.