One of the critical roles of the social scientist, especially in times of high change, is the scrutiny of important concepts as they emerge from time to time in the public arena (Lee 2009). In South Africa, political slogans frequently serve as the currency carrying important concepts in social discourse. Those slogans become the rallying point for political competition among rival parties but they are also taken up in everyday conversations among citizens, often without closer examination. In recent years, those slogans include ‘radical economic transformation’, ‘white monopoly capital’ and ‘land expropriation without compensation’.

It is not that these ‘concepts as slogans’ (Head 1988) have no substantive merit in a massively unequal society harbouring deep grievances in the present about an unresolved past. Nor should this criticism be read as a dismissal of political slogans, for they have always been ‘significant symbols of society’ (Raj 2007), with the power to suggest actions, evoke emotions and persuade publics (Denton 2009). It is, rather, that these crisp and simple descriptions of complex problems – such as the urgent need for land reform – are seldom subjected to critical reflection and quickly attain the status of ‘empty signifiers’ (Long 2018: 20). We now know, for example, that concepts like ‘white monopoly capital’ were conjured up by the disgraced British public relations firm Bell Pottinger to deflect attention from the charges of state capture and corruption by President Zuma and his cronies (Chutel 2017).

The task of the social scientist when ‘concepts as slogans’ emerge is to subject them to critical analysis with questions such as: What does the concept mean? Why now? Where does it come from? And whose purposes does it serve? Social scientists fail in their responsibilities when they merely parrot popular terms and rush towards uncritical usage in academic work, without much reflection on the social and intellectual validity of key concepts.