Some Initial Thoughts on the Implementation and Management of the Public Employment Service Within Gauteng Department of Labour

Abstract

Without a doubt, the implementation, management, and accountability of the recruitment and placement intervention – an intervention that applies to all public and private sectors of the economy – has improved with the introduction of monitoring and evaluation. However, discrepancies still linger in the Gauteng Provincial Department of Labour's recruitment and placement efforts. Unfortunately, other than persistent high unemployment in the province, there is limited evidence to show the ineffectiveness of the intervention in Gauteng. This paper provides some initial thoughts towards conceptualising research that consequently should interrogate the implementation and management of the recruitment and placement intervention in Gauteng Department of Labour. Generally, the paper employs a summative thematic content analysis of literature around this issue focussing focuses on (i) the research physical context or setting, (ii) the research problem, and (iii) past and current studies that have attempted to evaluate this intervention or any other similar interventions. Further, to interrogate the research problem, this paper makes use of the problem tree, trend analysis, and the theory of constraint to provide a structure that allows us to appreciate the extent of the problem. In all, this interrogation provides for effectively stating the research problem that an evaluation on the implementation and management of recruitment and placement intervention in Gauteng Department of Labour should be pursuing as well as the accompanying research purpose and the research questions. We then use this detail to propose the appropriate research strategy, design, procedure and methods as well as an interpretive framework that we can use to interpret our anticipated empirical research results.