**2.3 The realist social framework for analysis of corporate governance and reporting**

The category of HBUs or HDIs, as briefly alluded to in Section 2.1, happen to be in what used to be Bantustans or areas which used to be "black reserves", according to the old the racist apartheid system and its spatial planning policies. Theories who draw on critical realism, as a philosophy, namely, [16] argue that such a history constitute the "conditioned state" about the present, which is inherited not because of one's making or choices. Such theories further explain why such a state needs to be understood in terms of the three elements of structure, culture and agency, which, while mutually constitutive, need to be treated as analytically distinct. Only when such a conditioned state can be clearly delineated as relations of structure and agency and further as culture and agency, that and the social scientist can be able to understand the planned outcomes, which can either be transformative or reproductive, or the variations of these, about the conditioned state, depending on the mechanisms thereof as the process of socio-cultural and social interactions. Therefore, the process of refining and developing 'the transformative mechanisms' for what corporate governance should entail being reflective about the logic of university education in contexts of social justice and equity. While such a reflective process is situated in the main debates and conversations about institutional autonomy and public accountability, such debates are themselves conditional on the CGR contexts as evidenced in this paper. The process itself is made quite significant, since both institutional autonomy and accountability are, ironically, enshrined in the world celebrated Constitution of South Africa and its Bill of Rights.

For the purposes of the argument in this chapter, (**Figure 1**) portrays how the realist social theory, as an explanatory program, allows for the CGR deconstruction in ways that transformative agency can be a subject of emergence. CGR takes three elements of the social world as relations of structural system (SS), of a cultural system (CS) and of a human system (HS). It is important to note that, according to [16], what appears as structure, culture and agency operates at the level of systems (each of the Structure and Culture assume the macro level, which are about structural arrangement and logical connection, respectively, while the Agency acts back on both at micro level). Therefore, SS means leadership by the governing body, corporate governance roles, duties and responsibilities, for the assumed outcomes, and based on the declared principles of corporate governance as its guidelines, the aspirations, and benefits to the organization. CGR as CS refers to the knowledge systems or discursive resources that the incumbents might be drawing on in abiding by, or not of the CGR principles. In both cases of SS and CS is therefore the relative weight of Agency, which, by acting back at the micro level, might constitute either the embodied (the right actions about corporate governance) or the opposite (the disembodied selves). In all these accounts are therefore the implied assumptions about each of these elements of CGR as a social world,



#### **Figure 1.**

*The domains and social reality of corporate governance and reporting as mapping of Archer, 1996; 2007 over Bhaskar,1998; 2008, as created by the author.*

principles. The outcomes as indicated in Section 2.1 attest to the folly of such a logic, further to the notions of CGR as a cultural system and as a structural system.

In the next section, I, therefore, pursue this realist explanatory approach by discussing the silences and superficiality of CGR beyond the level of inductive and deductive logic, but at the level of abductive and retroductive logic. The latter refers to the application of critical discourse analysis about CGR practices as the subject of political interests, the materialist interests, and the related knowledge dimensions thereof in addition to how the latter two are taken upon as agency. The main claim about such an exercise is that the CGR practices, when they are subjected to a realist social program critique, then surface the discourses of use, which appears to be antithetical to the ideal of the KIV Code.

#### **2.4 Deconstruction: The King IV code of corporate governance and reporting**

Building on the growing body of knowledge about CGR should be the subject of a critique about the complexity of power relations in politics of knowledge and of being in the HETSA sector in general and in the case of HDIs. Such a project should not only be about the significance of transformation but the character of the project itself which seems to be constrained in the assumed trajectories and, as such, indicating interesting dynamics about CGR as the interplays of structure, culture and agency. This is therefore the reason for HDI cases in South Africa requiring prominence as the subject of explanatory critique in general and the cases of corporate governance crisis. Otherwise, the failure to embark on such scholarly projects would be travesty of justice to most communities who still reside in the communities where these universities are located, which is not because of a choice of their own but as part of the legacy of the racist apartheid system of South Africa.

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

When such a system continues to be deliberately dehumanizing and brutalizing for those who should be on the receiving end about the idea of university as the public good, as evidenced in the introductory part of this Section, that calls for enhanced scholarship of engagement about such situations and how such engagement needs to be a reflexive-dialectical process, which can allow for transformative agency to emerge. In the subsequent discussion, I pursue the disjuncture between the CGR practices and the reported outcomes to possible identify the potential challenges and opportunities.

#### *2.4.1 Deconstruction of the KIV CGR practices: What do they mean in critical realist terms?*

Further to the profile of the HDIs as outlined in Section 2.1. was the challenge of their unique history and social relations. The old racist apartheid system of South Africa preconditioned such universities by means of special planning policies that would categorize such universities as solely meant for black and socio-economically marginalized communities. A deconstruction effort for the enduring crisis of corporate governance would therefore have to account for how such a crisis derives from the enduring systems of power as domination and control and further to how such systems could be justified as knowledge. A two-phase strategy about critical discourse analysis therefore is the basis on how I describe the enduring crisis of CGR in the selected cases of HDIs in South Africa.

The first phase would focus on the first two levels, the domains of events and processes and additionally experiences and observations. Analysis at this level would therefore focus on texts and how such texts can be deconstructed from the de-ontological positions and self-referential explanations about the crisis. Such cases take the notion of practice and narratives as mutually constitutive but become problematic in two ways. First, as a preoccupation with what works and does not work about corporate governance, which therefore does not go far enough in accounting for the conditions that enable or constrain for such events or processes. Further, such explanations are self-referential in the sense that they remain self-contained about the own mainstream narratives about corporate governance as a practice, instead of allowing for what could be alternative explanations. Therefore, both the challenge of surface or de-ontology and self-referencing need to be deconstructed by means of engaging the practices at the level of discourses [24, 25] if accurate interpretations can be made in ways that literacy about corporate governance can be better promoted. The second phase would therefore focus on the realist domain (3rd level). The subsequent sections describe how critical discourse analysis was applied as a form of a deconstruction process before the developed insights were discussed.

Therefore, in line with this critical realist viewpoint, the first two levels of actual and empirical domains (**Figure 1**) would not be helpful enough in accounting for how the crisis occurs and is further experienced and observed. Such levels are easily available in the form of hard data as outlined in Section 2.1 as the contradictions of the ideal practices and outcomes in corporate governance and leadership. In addition to what could be inductive and deductive logics about such a crisis, the critical realist analysis would have to draw both on the abductive logic (non-self-referential explanations) and on the retroductive logic (beyond the de-ontological positions) to account for the mechanisms which generated such a crisis. Not only the silences and superficiality about the crisis in corporate governance practices, but the analysis for the states and properties about such practices, would therefore have to be identified if credible explanations could be provided beyond the de-ontological positions and self-explanations about such practices.

In this sense, recognizing the structural systems, in the form of roles, duties and responsibilities, should be enabling and empowering instead of recognizing the systems of domination and control. Sense and meaning making, on the other hand, takes the cultural element whereby the logic about corporate governance should be inherent in the fiduciary roles and responsibilities as truth about and the emancipatory project for the other. This cultural element is what makes the logic of university education to be the common and the public good. This is what ought to be the intrinsic value of what university education, while the enactment of both the structural and cultural systems is what ought to count as a human system, and therefore as agency. Therefore, these are the issues that I sought to explore in the deconstruction of the King IV Report in the case of the selected HDIs in South Africa.

#### *2.4.2 Deconstruction for de-ontological positions and self-referential explanations*

The governance crisis [14] corroborates the previous studies [9–13]. For me, the latter cases question why in post democracy some institutions in the HETSA sector still experience continuities about corporate governance and leadership practices from the old regimes of order and truth. Albert Einstein defines insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. The crisis as outlined in Section 2.1 seems to frustrate what should be the recent advances in CGR as the codes are espousing. As it is demonstrated in **Figure 1**, not only such cases reflect the domain of the actual but also the domain of the empirical about how CGR is observed and experienced both by the actors (CGR incumbents and the National Ministry of Higher Education and Training) and those researching about it. Such a CGR data attests to this situation as the silences and superficiality about CGR from a critical realist perspective. Because such data makes for the kind of knowledge which remains de-ontological and self-referential, it can thus be declared as common-sense knowledge. As such, the narratives about such practices, as evidenced in the Administrator Reports, constitute the contradictions of CGR practices, according to the KIV Report principles.

While this analysis acknowledges all the antecedent literatures about corporate governance and leadership practices, the explanatory critiques thereof constitute the advances in such a body of knowledge. A deconstruction process does not only seek to engage the current literatures but also offer potential solutions to the main challenge of de-ontological positions and self-referential explanations. Dealing with the challenge of ontological collapse about the current body of knowledge means providing the explanatory account about the states and properties of CGR as the conditions that enable/constrain CGR practices for the ideal of transformative practices than the currently reproductive. The explanatory critique about CGR practices is therefore about avoiding the ontological collapse in two ways—first, as reification (a blind concern with what works and what does not instead of an examination of the conditions or properties of structure, culture and agency) and second, as the conflation of position and practice about the incumbents in the CGR practices.

### **3. Corporate governance and leadership and the contradictions of position and practice**

The two-part deconstruction process, as outlined above, indicates corporate governance as the contradictions of position and practice. The challenges of policy-practice dissonance are when the government's attempts for transformation might be regarded as the proxy for the actual change than the means to an end. At a micro level, such cases as reported here, are clear cases about when the dangers of the discourse of economic rationality and its neoliberal thinking can play out as pillage of public resources,

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

which cannot be promoted in consideration of corporate governance as an ethical practice. Therefore, the realist ontology problematizes steering and strategic direction as leadership role and responsibilities (doing the right things right), for example, when such a structural system is posited as the proxy for trust, good reputation and legitimacy, as the actual outcomes. At the point of cultural system, the same roles and responsibilities would be a subject of critique when corporate governance and leadership are understood and explained as value free, apolitical, asocial and neutral. The same realist argument about the Council's roles and responsibilities would also apply in all other cases about leadership roles and responsibilities, when those might be seen as the panacea for ethical controls. The same would apply at the point of a cultural system and the value-laden approach to the notion of corporate governance.

The cases as reported in this chapter indicate that, while the regulation of the governance roles is necessary, are such a regulation is not adequate for the actual practice to take place. This then becomes a realist question of what structural arrangements can mean in practice. That is, when such arrangements, as a structural system can be completely different from how such systems can be enacted. This is normally the case when the incoherence manifests as dissonances between the workings of power and the knowledge thereof and in ways that the discrepancies might have to be resolved in ways that are sustainably impactful. The cases, as reported in this chapter, indicate how corporate governance, although espoused as based on CGR principles, can also result in the opposite. Such is also the case of a social practice, which, with its beliefs, ideas and values being mutually constitutive, can be contested in actual practice. In the following paragraphs, I try to illustrate this point.

In yet another case of corporate governance and value systems, the discussions in the national parliament surfaced the challenge of treating the logic of university education and corporate governance in conflated ways. Such a case played out as political posturing, when some members of a political party could call for closure of these 'rural based universities.' Such a call invited objections from the other members of a political party. The next extract indicates such a case, when the role of university needs to be treated as analytically distinct from that of the leadership, management and governance systems thereof.

**"***Ms X reiterated the concern over degrees being sold and the lack of focus on the consequences that perpetrators had to face. She expressed her agreement with Mr Z in the need for immediate intervention at HET-D. Ms X agreed with Mr Z that the university could benefit the development of rural communities and young people and so should not be closed but improved."*

The second case about the dysfunctional cultural system of corporate governance manifested when there seemed to be evidence of hegemonic tendencies about the other.

*HET-C: "(Mr X) also questioned the manner in which his suspension was handled. He said he was given an hour to respond to the notice of suspension and the chancellor sent two security guards to his home to deliver the suspension letter as the country is on lockdown."*

**HET-D: "***During the site visits to the campus, splinter groups of students had chased other students away from the meeting, with the help of police and the Vice-Chancellor. The HET-D atmosphere was very polarized, which impeded the quality of the report's observations and recommendations."*

Such tendencies manifest when they seem to perpetuate social and historical disadvantage, exclusion and marginalization, which was the main feature of the old racist apartheid system. Such notions of corporate governance need to be problematized as being misrecognition of the other, and further as being reductionist about the practice itself, when the alternative could be in consideration of context and cultural relevance in complex and open social systems. Such systems, therefore, call for understanding of corporate governance, and therefore managerialism, as engaged, instead of assuming it as a proxy for change, or as a value-free form of change.

#### **3.1 Transformative agency: deconstruction for discourses of use**

The domain of the real, and its claim for retroduction, points to the understanding of how CGR practices can present dilemma to the incumbents as the exercise of agency and what can be done about it. While CGR is regulated, it also takes the variation route at the point of human systems, thus indicating what could be the structural conditions or the generative mechanisms for such events. To drive home the point about the value of transformative agency, the following observation is quite instructive:

*'Powerholders and superordinate groups have both vested interests and the institutional and cultural capacities to disseminate their own self-justificatory beliefs across the rest of society, to misinterpret inegalitarian social relations as in the interests of everyone, or to justify publicly their own oppressive or exploitative institutions in the eyes of the downtrodden or subordinate.' ([17]: 33).*

The challenge about the latter statement is whether the people in historically black universities, in contexts of structural disadvantage in South Africa, have the voice which is loud enough for their self-empowerment and emancipation. Such a question would also relate to whether such a voice can be organized in ways that the power thereof can be more elaborative, thus leading to required conceptual or competence shifts. The potential resolution point about the current crisis of corporate governance and leadership should be the enhancement of transformative Agency by means of making loud the voice for social justice and equity when it should matter most. One could make the implicit assumptions that the Council members, as alluded to in Section 2.1, were well inducted to the workings of KIV Codes, and as such, such a process involved a plethora of workshops and conferences (the domain of the actual as reinforcing the quality of decision making in the CGR functions). However, the enduring crisis points to what could be the generative mechanisms for what appears as events and processes at the domain of the actual and further to how the latter is observed and experienced at the empirical level.

Therefore, the cases as reported in this chapter indicate that, while University Council membership qualities would be necessary, still they would not be adequate if the role of transformative agency is not made explicit in terms of both the power relations and materialist conditions of corporate governance, on the one hand, and the related beliefs, values and ideas thereof on the other hand. Such cases constitute the invariance or the reproductive state about social injustices despite what corporate governance espouses as institutional cultures that should reflect trust, good reputation and legitimacy. It would therefore be at the level of agency, as human systems, that the practical alternative could constitute the domain for what ought to be the new possibility about the reported crisis [18].

#### **4. The practical alternative towards enhanced transformative agency**

Transformative agency is elaborated upon as one major element not only about the corporate governance as structural system but also about the related cultural

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

system thereof. That ought to be about the idea of a university not only as knowledge constitutive but also as the public good. In that regard, corporate governance and leadership entail working with the necessary contradictions. It is about the reflexivedialectical process, which ought to be about the correction of the idea of a Corporate Governance where such an idea seems to be subjected to conditions of constraints. While university autonomy means the protection of academic freedoms and rights in how the academic enterprise can be led managed and governed, on the one hand, public accountability, on the other hand, thereof means such rights and freedoms are not unmediated, especially in contexts of social equalities and justice. Therefore, based on these profiles, the case of HBU remains the main feature—rather, the unintended consequences of the HETSA transformation project. It is against these observations, therefore, that the contestations about the logic of university education, and therefore about the spaces where corporate governance reporting are applied, need to be seen as discursive spaces that reflect the matrix of power. Therefore, if the idea of a university as a public good is to become a reality for most people in South Africa, who should be concerned about the current corporate governance crisis in HDIs and what kind of projects and practices are required thereof? It should be considered hypocritical and therefore objectionable and rejected that HDIs would have Council members and yet their powers cannot be expressed as empowering knowledge systems and in ways which can promote social justice and equity for people who, by a choice not of their own, are still locked up in the previously disadvantaged backgrounds. Therefore, in the next two points, I illustrate how a refocus on what should be the transformative mechanisms in relations of structure and culture might be useful for resolving the disjuncture of governance purpose and outcomes.

#### **4.1 The reconstructive efforts towards the advances in corporate governance and reporting**

Transformative agency in corporate governance shall have been achieved when the corrective action efforts as relations of structure and culture, as discussed in Section 3, are not just being ameliorative about the status quo, as reported in the previous section. Corporate governance and leadership need to be improved in such cases in ways that the university profiles finally reflect the logic of university education as the public good for all. That would be the state, which can finally reflect a network of outcomes, which position corporate governance as the enabling system for the ideal of social justice and equity. Therefore, the practical alternative to the crisis as outlined in Section 2 would mean concealing the current constraints to structure, and to culture and therefore in ways that can enhance agency. To be more exact, this would also mean concealing constraints to the current corporate governance practices. Such an effort would have to try to disentangle the structure as roles, duties and responsibilities about governance from the enactment thereof, that is, as agency, and further the related culture as beliefs, values, and ideas about governance from agency. The results of the latter should be improved knowledge about corporate governance in context and culturally relevant ways. The following observation is quite suggestive of that approach.

*'the social struggles of the oppressed and exploited against such structures and their beneficiaries are morally right; they are objectively, ethico-political 'right-action.' ([17]: 36).*

The HETSA cases as alluded here are calling for a time and spaces to reflect deeply on the constitutional values and how those values can be re-imagined as an idea of a university for a world beyond the present.

(**Figure 2**) portrays how the ideal about the CGR actors, in cases as described in Section 2.1, would have to be a subject of the reflexive-dialectical process, which would entail the socio-cultural conditioning of groups. Corporate governance and leadership practices take place as the idea of being in time and space. Such practices are lived by means of the dimensions about such states as criticality, reflexivity and for praxis. The matter of time as state of conditioning can be deconstructed as the habitus, as the pure conditioning to agency, which would have to call for the new processes as morphogenesis ([16]: 276) explains that "the point about morphogenesis is to clearly delineate who is who in these interplays and who does what in the process of social transformation'. An issue would be the CGR cases as the structureagency conditioning as the habitus-reflexivity interface. Such cases reflect the state of morphostasis, the reproductive outcomes, the Habit-Reflexivity interface as predominant habitual action and low reflexivity (cultural and structural conditioning). That would therefore point to the need for the kinds of CGR practices which can allow for enhanced reflexivity in ways that, through morphogenesis, the cultural and structural domains (**Figure 1**) cause elaboration and overtime.

Therefore, being reflexively dialectical about corporate governance would have to entail a process that could allow for transformative agency to emerge [19]. Transformative agency in cases of a crisis of corporate governance cases should mean disentangling human action from the espoused duties, roles and responsibilities. It also means dislocating human action from the espoused ideas, propositions, and values about governance. Such a process of deconstruction allows for understanding the actual nature of contradictions, tensions, inconsistencies and lacks that come about when the structure is conflated with the culture, and further when the agency acting on structure might be conflated with agency acting on the culture. That process ought to involve understanding the practical steps for the incumbents' choices and practices as being in the world of university leadership, management, and governance in contexts of social justice and equity which cannot afford to reflect corruption and malpractices. That would also mean the enactment of KIV principles in ways that, indeed, can promote value creation in historically disadvantaged institutions instead of diminishing the very limited resources in their disposal. For example, the HET-A and HET-D cases, when these institutions had to be subjects of the administration regime more than once post constitutional democracy, were quite illustrative about how government or social science interventions can die in their own tracks.

**Figure 2.** *Dimensions & realms: Corporate governance and reporting in the idea of a university (Dwayi, 2021).*

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

#### **4.2 Reclaiming corporate governance and reporting for the idea of university as the public good**

What is suggested in this chapter is the need for further engagement at the level of culture and agency and further through what could be a reflexive dialectical process [20]. Such a strategy can be effective only when there are deliberate and conscious efforts on the part both individual and collective agents to promote and monitor corporate governance systems more as the values in use than the currently espoused. While complexity shall always inform the nature of the world, and thus the potential surprises depending on scale, it becomes the responsibility of CGR scholars to note how the principles of governance, especially in the university education environment, can fail in their own tracks. As I briefly alluded in Section 2 of this chapter, HETSA is still fragmented along power interests and knowledge domains of class, power and privilege almost 30 decades into constitutional democracy. As evidenced in the main thrust of the discussion in this chapter, the HDIs are not only a subject of marginalizing tendencies by the historical systems of domination and control, but members making University Councils in these institutions continue to perpetuate structural disadvantage as double marginalization about the Other.

University education spaces are for the public good and for how such goods can be dispensed for the betterment of all. University Councils cannot afford to appear as dispensing the material good in ways that benefit those who are already positionally advantaged and at the expense of the Other. University education constitutes spaces for Enlightenment Values where the name of the game ought to be for the truth about, and the emancipatory project for, the Other. That then points to how university education, as the potential system of dominance and control, can be engaged as the alternative system in service of the Other. Therefore, deconstruction should be about the potential to address the constraints on human freedom and enabling power in the HDI contexts.

A focus on the structural conditions or the generative mechanisms at the domain of the real would mean being deliberately conscious about the interplays of structure, culture and agency factors in open and complex social systems. This could mean contracting the incumbents (Council Members) in terms of the required knowledge for the CGR and even building capabilities for them to possible have conceptual and competence shifts about the ideal CGR outcomes. Therefore, the practical alternative is possible only when CGR can be understood as analytically distinct in the following three ways:


This could be a well-developed program for the duration of the tenure of these members, where the ability to internalize the basic CGR principles seeks to eliminate (contingent contradiction) the current social ills while protecting (the necessary compatibility) the idea of a university. Such a process should entail impact tracking about CGR and for sustainable value creation about the idea of University in the HDI context. For South Africa, the National Democratic Revolution Project in general and the National Development Plan 2030, which need to emerge as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030, and further as Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want Such projects for value creation are constitutive of the reflexive imperative. The CGR practices, as discourses of use, should entail the enabling system for the university context in the South African context as the culturally relevant and a responsive project for each case of university education. Such a context would need to consider how the HDIs continue to be in perpetual crisis because of history and social relations, which was never of their own making. However, such a history needs to be reimagined and better elaborated on as the expressively veracious considerations where the idea of a university finally constitutes the public good. For the corporate governance and leadership practitioners, the clarion call is for the ability to dispense power and privilege more for the previously disadvantaged than for themselves. For the growing body of knowledge, which is the ambit of scholarship, such an ability means praxis artistry, the ability to ensure the unity of theory and practice in practice.
