**5. The conclusion**

The potential advances in the study of corporate governance and reporting (CGR) practices need to be understood in terms of the contemporary theories of change. Engaging the theories that draw on the realist social theory, which is anchored on realist philosophy about deep ontology and stratified reality, causation and emergence, can delink the political and economic interests about CGR practices. The realist social explanatory program allows for the understanding of structural systems as the interplays with the cultural systems thereof, and how that knowledge can be taken upon as agency. There is a need to understand corporate governance and reporting practices as emerging from the basic and the running thread to what finally becomes a corporate governance and reporting culture. A critique of the practices as alluded to the selected cases of this chapter sheds some light on why and when such corporate governance, while regulated, the crisis persists even against the regular state interventions. The cases of unethical conduct cannot be condoned if the business of university education is about the enlightenment values and their twin friends of truth about, and the emancipation project for, the Other. Such cases are clear evidence about how corporate governance in university education can be constitutive of the unethical culture. Such cases are being about opportunistic about university education transformation, which is therefore, against the ideal for the public and the common good.

As it were, corporate governance in general and the King IV Report is not the panacea for addressing all the social ills that tend to characterize the contexts of enduring social injustice and poverty. Literature on King IV Code of Corporate Governance and Reporting is still in an early stage of development. Furthermore, the HDI cases in South Africa need a particular focus beyond what is currently reported in literature. Therefore, the ideological stance that the actors of corporate governance can draw upon need to be troubled in ways that the practical solutions about the enduring crisis might be better understood and explained. A deconstruction approach is, therefore, suggested for how the relations of structure, culture and agency can be identified and analyzed, and for how understanding the interplays between the three elements in ways that the current crisis can be

*Corporate Governance and Reporting in Contexts of Social Justice and Equity, Deconstructing... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101188*

effectively ameliorated if not completely uprooted, at best. For that to be a practical alternative, only with the kind of transformative results, which promote the sociostructural conditions of justice, fairness, democracy and empathy, that the idea of corporate governance in HDIs might be the actual reality.

The cases as reported in this chapter are not representative of the whole HETSA sector, but of a particular context whose transformation events seem to play out in ways that are quite peculiar about the logic of university education. However, the principles drawn from the analysis and the subsequent discussion might be generalizable to other similar environments. More studies and insights are required about the conditions that seem to remain a constraint in ways that continue to make leadership, management and governance roles susceptible to maladministration practices. The units of analysis thereof are much bigger than the limitations of this chapter. They entail a focus within the institutions themselves, at the interface of national or government macro-politics and the institutional micro-politics, and not to mention the impact of the current era of de-globalization, populism and regionalization. As I demonstrated in this chapter, what is claimed as the absoluteness of the principles of corporate governance shall be more realizable when such principles can be deconstructed in terms of the elements of structure, culture and agency, and where agency must be foregrounded as interacting with both structure and culture in analytically distinct ways. Failure to do that might be the reason for why even after the earlier studies about the administration regimes, corporate governance crisis still exists, and more administration regimes are still appointed in the South-African context.

### **Author details**

Valindawo Valile M. Dwayi Walter Sisulu University, East London, South Africa

\*Address all correspondence to: vdwayi@wsu.ac.za

© 2022 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
