| Summary: | Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, 2013. === Curriculum in Public Management has been under-theorised in terms of sociological perspectives particularly those addressing the social nature of how curriculum choices are made, the types of knowledge and social relations that curricula reflect, the identities of the civil servant graduates that are privileged through these relationships and the implications of these choices for both student and staff identity and student progress.
Providing evidence from a single qualitative case study this thesis examines and analyses the development of a Masters curriculum in Public Management in South Africa designed to educate public servants for a post-apartheid civil service during the years 1993-2005. This curriculum was developed by recontextualising content from various disciplines and by reference to the field of practice. This study examines various attempts to overcome fragmentation in the curriculum, the logics that were seen as being potentially integrating and difficulties experienced in using these logics as a basis for integrating curriculum contents. It draws on concepts and models developed by Basil Bernstein theorising regions, recontextualisation and integrated curriculum types.
This study enables an analysis of the difficulties experienced in successfully implementing a curriculum in the under-examined area of taught, conversion-type, postgraduate Masters degrees in higher education. The findings show that each of the integrating logics that were appealed to were not able to adequately fulfil an ‘integrating’ function. Curriculum developers struggled to shape a curriculum that was coherent where criteria for progress were clear and shared. Curriculum developers drew on integrating ideas that were sometimes contradictory and proved difficult to turn into principles for developing strong and explicit relationships between an idea (or ideal) and what was taught. By not examining curriculum in terms of its key role in classifying educational knowledge and blurring boundaries between different knowledge forms this curriculum did not take into account the various roles that different boundaries play for structuring progression and shaping both learner and staff identities. Attempts to combine practice and the theoretical without explicit engagement with their
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differences and the implications of these for curriculum and pedagogy resulted in neither the ‘academic’ nor the ‘professional’ being strengthened over time.
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