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The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of volunteerism during the digitisation project by the Office of the Premier in Mpumalanga with a view recommending the best practice.

The empirical data was collected through the semi-structured qualitative interviews with the records manager and ten volunteer archivists employed by the Office of the Premier.

Local pupils within the Mpumalanga province were recruited to participate in the digitisation project as a form of youth empowerment. The Mpumalanga Provincial Archives was not involved in the digitisation project to ensure that all digitisation specification was in line with the requirement of the provincial archives. Furthermore, a lack of resources to implement the digitisation project was cited as the main stamping block for the successful implementation of the project.

This paper is limited to the Office of the premier, in the Mpumalanga province.

Archivists interested in recruiting volunteers on a digitisation project can use this paper to understand the benefits and cost of volunteer labor before putting volunteer projects into practice.

The success of a digitisation project depends on the involvement of the Mpumalanga Provincial archives.

This paper presents a unique case study in South Africa of a digitisation project staffed with volunteers in the office of the Premier.

The purpose of this paper is to assess recent strategic sustainability policy, planning and assessment efforts in Victoria, Australia.

An interpretive approach to policy analysis provides the methodological foundation for the analysis. Evidence is drawn from the analysis of policy texts and semi‐structured interviews.

Sustainability attracted considerable policy attention in Victoria during the first decade of the 21st century, with stated ambitions for Victoria to become “the sustainable state” and “world leaders in environmental sustainability”. In pursuing these ambitions, Victoria's efforts centred on hosting a summit, articulating medium‐term directions and priorities, releasing a whole of government framework to advance sustainability, and establishing a Department of Sustainability and Environment, and a Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability. However, the evidence indicates these efforts would have benefited from greater public engagement and input, stronger governance arrangements, and a broader conceptualisation of sustainability.

The evidence presented highlights the implications associated with efforts to promote sustainability through strategic policy and planning processes.

This paper provides an informed, yet policy relevant, analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and possibilities associated with pursuing sustainability at the sub‐national level. It also highlights the ways in which policy objectives can be frustrated by failing to establish the solid foundations necessary for building a robust approach to promoting sustainability. The value of progressing sustainability within a strategic improvement cycle is also highlighted.

This chapter examines one of the most contested issues in Public Administration, namely political–administrative relationships. The first part of the chapter begins with a brief overview of the features of an ideal-type bureaucracy. Next is a literature review of political–administrative relationships. This is followed by an analysis of typologies of political–administrative relationships, with particular reference to developing countries. The second part of the chapter analyses the evolution of political–administrative relationships since the dawn of South African democracy in 1994. It examines the growing politicisation of the public service, the weakening of the powers of public officials vis-a-vis Ministers and the emasculation of the PSC. Data indicate that the government is unable to fill posts at the Senior Management Service (SMS) level and that there are a high number of acting HoDs, an indicator of instability. Finally, it uses Dasandi and Esteve’s typology of political–administrative relationships in developing countries to interpret the South African case.

In his autobiography, Chen Shui-bian (1999, p. 40) condemned the Koumintang's (KMT's) corruption and praised the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for being free from money politics and corruption. The DPP fought the 1992 Legislative Yuan election campaign effectively on an anticorruption platform and used the same strategy in subsequent elections. If Chen Shui-bian had criticized the KMT for its involvement with “black gold” politics and had won the 2000 presidential election on his anticorruption platform, why was he and his family found guilty of corruption after his second term of office? The short answer is that even though he had promised to curb corruption, President Chen himself had succumbed to corruption after assuming office. In June 2002, Keesing's Contemporary Archives cited a poll in Taiwan that indicated that more respondents had perceived the DPP to be more corrupt than the KMT (Copper, 2006, p. 14).

Social innovation (SI) remains a latent area in the South African local government (LG) sphere despite its growing use in public-sector service delivery globally. This paper aims to investigate the use of SI in the service delivery of LG through a comparison between the City of Ghent (CoG) (Belgium) and the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality (MMM) (South Africa).

Through a comparative case study approach, qualitative research methods were used to both collect and analyze the data. Data collection instruments included document analysis (naturally occurring data), semi-structured interviews (generated data) and focus group discussions (generated data).

Although LG is obliged to collaborate with citizens, various factors influence citizens’ ability to make contributions, even when platforms are created. Collaborative initiatives aid in the realization of collective development visions and enhance citizen participation in a more responsive and inclusive approach to service delivery. Collaborations would require citizens and LG officials to be empowered by finding new ways of working together, as well as developing skills.

Citizens’ participation when SI is used to enhance service delivery should be meticulously planned. Co-producing services require a conducive internal organizational context that advances citizen participation in the governance and decision-making of service delivery, which is likewise optimal for enhancing the use of SI during the respective co-production service delivery stages. Achieving a conducive internal organizational context is influenced by the role of LG officials and politicians in understanding the value proposition of participation in service delivery to citizens. This value proposition is crucial to building and establishing a trust relationship between citizens, LG officials and politicians. Finally, consensus concerning the concept of SI and its use and implementation is important to ensure its consistent use and application by a municipality, and thus calls for further in-depth investigation.

SI is a nascent area for which the discourse is still under development, and it is a concept that is often the subject of debate in literature. This paper is justified by the fact that the use of SI in the South African LG sphere lags behind the growing use thereof in public-sector service delivery by LGs globally. In addition, the study presents novel insights regarding similarities and differences in the use of SI through a comparison between two LGs, namely, the MMM and the CoG.

Among the various pro-sustainability strategies that universities adopt, Stellenbosch University’s 2030 Agenda further challenges universities to provide sustainability education that enables students to become change agents for sustainability. The Listen, Live and Learn (LLL) initiative is a co-curricular programme developed at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, that seeks to foster social cohesion and develop change agency among students. This study aims to understand how LLL students had developed agency for change through their experiential learning in the programme.

Using a transformative sustainability learning approach, this study examined secondary data containing qualitative and quantitative data from the 2018 LLL end-of-year survey. The qualitative data was analysed thematically, and the quantitative data was analysed using counts and frequencies.

Through their participation in the programme, the students learned about their character and opened up to engage with the ‘others’ whom they lived with in the same residence. They also reported becoming more open-minded, intentional, reflective and confident. Another personal change reported by the students was their ability to collaborate with their housemates. The learners recommended that the programme could be improved by providing resources for house projects, guidance with inviting house theme experts and help with conflict resolution.

Through this research, the authors have demonstrated the ability of a transformative sustainability learning programme to effect a change in the attitudes, norms and behaviours of students at a higher educational institution towards a sustainable and just society.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges of transforming South Africa’s health sector through the country’s eHealth Strategy and particularly one of its key components, the implementation of an integrated Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS).

The study conducted an extensive review of literature and used it as a basis to analyse the challenges as well as opportunities in South Africa’s transformation path within its health sector based on the nation’s eHealth Strategy.

South Africa’s health sector faces three main transformation challenges: inequity, legacy of fragmentation and a service delivery structure biased towards curative rather than preventive services. Health information systems provide a solid platform for improving efficiency but, within South Africa, these systems have been highly heterogeneous. A recent study showed the country had more than 40 individual health information systems scattered in all provinces, with over 50 per cent not adhering to any national or international standards and more than 25 per cent being stand-alone applications that shared information neither locally nor externally. The eHealth Strategy offers a robust platform to start addressing the legacy of fragmentation and lack of interoperability. However, it also raises a few other concerns, including the use of different terminology such as Electronic Medical Record (EMR) interchangeable with Electronic Health Record (EHR), or EDRMS parallel with Electronic Content Management (ECM). In addition, there is the opportunity to explore the use of the maturity model concept in the EDRMS implementation experiences within South Africa.

This paper demonstrated the complex nature of the legacy of fragmentation in South Africa’s health information systems and explored three aspects relating to terminology as well as maturity models that should be considered in the country’s future eHealth Strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to find an answer the question of whether an educational institution of a fair socio-economic mix of pupils, and an institution favoured with powerful political connections, made any difference to access, equity, and exclusivity in relation to the transition into secondary education. It undertakes this purpose as a historical investigation of Junction Park State School in the early twentieth century combined with statistical analysis of family backgrounds of scholarship holders and their cohorts from 1915 to 1932.

The socio-economic study uses a published list of scholarship holders from Junction Park State School for the years 1924-1932. The study compares the scholarship groupings with their different school cohorts for the same years using the data on parental occupations, extracted from the Junction Park State School Admission Records 1915-1931. After refinement the study examines a cohort data set of 4,531 pupils which includes 287 scholarship holders. Parental occupations are categorised into socio-economic groupings with high and low occupational ends. There were 237 parental occupations described among the cohort, 1915-1931, from the admission records.

The statistical chance of obtaining scholarship is increased for a pupil from “commercial low” and “industrial low” background when the school starts with a cohort that has a large representation from such backgrounds. Pupils who were at the lower end of the socio-economic scale at Junction Park State School did much better in scholarship outcomes than for the state. However, pupils whose family background was at the high end of the professions did marginally better than the state result. For the school between 1915 and 1932, in most socio-economic groupings, the boys outperform the girls in the like-to-like comparisons.

The numeric value is excessively low for the primary producers (high) category and numbers in cohort groupings vary. This study deliberately applied like-to-like comparisons: the number of scholarship holders compared to their own gender for the same socio-economic cohort. Percentile in relation to the study’s total was not used due to numeric variations between cohort sizes. The study is a historical investigation of a formative period before Junction Park State School developed its reputation as a scholarship school in the 1940s, and historical factors relating to the post-Second World War era would have different results for a similar statistical analysis.

The paper presents a case study of particular historical significance; however, a generic principle that institutional status can change access and equity opportunities can be tested within the historical setting. The paper claims that historical investigation provides the groundwork to establish the distinctive actuality. Historical investigation picks up on unusual patterns over time, not necessarily to disprove the sociological model, but more to test the model against actual events.

The Queensland social history is connected to the study’s statistical analysis. The data are considered from a perspective that, first, Junction Park had a diverse population of pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds. Second, the school had a solid reputation as a leading school, partly from the political standing of the school leadership, and partly from the strength of its scholarship teachers. Together these factors suggest that pupils at Junction Park State School from the socio-economic backgrounds less inclined to foster educational values were given greater support to achieve better scholarship outcomes.

Statistical analysis is rarely brought to academic history work. There are greater risks in misinterpreting the data. There is also a difficult enterprise of extracting the required information. Nevertheless, the reward from this paper is an insightful view of a large and an innovating Queensland primary school, picking up the details in the life experience of pupils. In that historical process there is a greater degree of accuracy and better interpretive value which can be applied to the sociological model.

Public sector organisations in the developing world contexts have hugely invested in procuring information management systems such as the electronic document and records management system (EDRMS). The procurement and implementation of these systems come at a huge cost to taxpayers. Unfortunately, most of these systems remain white elephants due to reluctance by the anticipated users to adopt and use them in their information management endeavours. This study aims to understand Action Officers’ perceptions of, adoption and/or usage of the document workflow management system (DWMS) at the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Botswana. The DWMS is one type of EDRMS.

The survey uses a questionnaire distributed in Gaborone, Botswana to gather data on the perceptions of anticipated users of the DWMS. The study used a modified form of UTAUT as a theoretical lens to explore user’s perception on the adoption and use of DWMS at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Botswana. The population of the study was 68. A total of 53 (86.89 per cent) out of 61 users of DWMS were purposively sampled and responded to the questionnaire. The rest took part in interviews.

Negative attitudes to computers, computer anxiety, the complexity of DWMS and its incompatibility to current working practices influences Action and Records Officers’ unwillingness to adopt and use the DWMS.

This study was limited to the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI)’s Department of Corporate Services, so its findings cannot be statistically generalized to the MTI as a whole. Another limitation relates to the secretive nature of staff in some government departments which lead them to provide partial information related to the study. Finally, the additional technology adoption factors discovered from interviews (i.e. computer anxiety, incompatibility of DWMS to current work practices, negative attitudes to system use and complexity of the system) have not been empirically tested to ascertain their validity. This provides an opportunity for a future study to empirically test the said additional factors.

To mitigate the lower DWMS adoption and usage, robust change management and communication were identified as some of the critical factors that should be considered. The identified factors may be used in drafting a model to aid the implementation of DWMS in Botswana or in a contextually similar environment in the developing world.

This study provides empirical evidence from an original study.