Quality of care is a concept used to assess the value of healthcare services. Measures of quality of care are important in South Africa given the lack of information on the quality of services delivered in the healthcare sector. Pressure ulcers are an example of an adverse outcome of a hospital case and indicate poor quality of care. The financial implications of this event therefore represent an estimate of the cost of poor quality of care. The objective of this research is to estimate the financial implications of pressure ulcers in private hospitals in South Africa on a risk-adjusted basis. Pressure ulcers are identified using administrative data from medical schemes. Statistical modelling and statistical tests are used to create risk cells so that comparisons are done on a like-for-like basis. The results indicate that the average financial implications for a hospital case where an individual is diagnosed with a pressure ulcer, on a risk-adjusted and weighted basis, is 3.3 times the average financial implications for a hospital case where an individual is not diagnosed with a pressure ulcer. The impact of this event on the medical scheme industry is estimated at R1.4 billion. Identifying hospital cases where an individual is diagnosed with a pressure ulcer is limited because the data are used for reimbursement and case management. The financial implications could have been affected by additional factors not available in the data. Pressure ulcers result in non-financial implications for the individuals receiving and delivering healthcare services. These are not quantified in this research. Pressure ulcers are only one measure amongst many metrics that can be used to assess quality of care. Private hospitals can use a measure of pressure ulcers to quantify the quality of their healthcare services. Managed care organisations can therefore use these results to create a network of hospitals and they can use these results when negotiating with hospitals on the amount that they will reimburse them for the services that they provide.

Bibliography: leaves 116-123. / The concept of style analysis is rapidly spreading in the money management business. In addition to it's use in the areas of benchmarking, portfolio structuring, risk control and performance attribution, style analysis has also been shown to be a powerful tool for identifying and evaluating the groupings and classification of investment portfolios. This study is based on an iterative application of William Sharpe's technique of returns-based style analysis. In essence the technique is used to create purified unit trust style indices in order to verify the existing classification of equity unit trusts. The technique is extended for the purpose of confirming the returns-based misclassified funds through testing the fit of combinations of style factor returns derived from a composition-based factor model.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / The key objective involved the research to discover how strategic cost management may improve service delivery. How could strategic cost management support public private partnership initiatives to improve service delivery by the public sector? Thus a detailed review of literature was done, contributing to the debate and better understanding of this specific research question. The objectives are to research what were public private partnerships and how they work so that a contribution could be made to close the gap identified in management practice and inform practitioners how to deal with public private partnerships.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This study investigates the importance that young adults attribute to their future work and family roles and examines whether this helps predict significant variance in expectations about future work-family conflict and work-family enrichment. Usable responses to an online survey were received from 448 university students at the University of Cape Town. Cluster analysis differentiated between four distinct life role salience profiles. To examine differences across the role profiles MANOVA was used.

Bibliography: leaves 93-97. / The analysis of this topic has continued to draw attention from academics such as Jensen Johnson and Mercer (1996), Patelis (1997) and Booth and Booth (2001) who examine the results of Fama et al. (1988) under differing monetary policy regimes. Jensen et al. (1996) posit that monetary stringency affects investors' required rate of return, which is consistent with Fama et al.'s (1989) arguments that predictable variation in returns reflects rational variation in required returns. Patelis (1997) finds that monetary variables used in his analysis are marginally significant predictors of security returns across different time horizons, while Booth et al. (2001) find that measures of the stance of monetary policy contain significant explanatory information that may be used to forecast expected stock and bond returns.

Includes executive summary. / Includes bibliographical references. / Substance abuse is a social problem that has contributed to a burden on the justice system. In South Africa, this problem has been found to be prevalent in Cape Town, the capital of the Western Cape. Methamphetamine, alcohol, cannabis, heroin and cocaine are the most commonly used drugs for which people have sought treatment. These substances are associated with violent behaviour and mental health behaviours which then result in criminal activities. Treatment however is not easily accessible for some socio-economic groups as it is expensive and geographically inaccessible. Alternate methods of treatment in the form of community interventions have been implemented in response to the need for treatment in these disadvantaged communities. This report is an evaluation of one such intervention based in Hanover Park, Cape Town.

Includes bibliographical references. / The term effectiveness is used extensively to describe organisations, groups and individuals. The fact that some organisations, groups and individuals are measurably more effective than others is a basic assumption of economic, organisation and behavioural theory. However, despite this frequent use, there is very little agreement amongst the users, both academic and business, as to what exactly 'effectiveness' means. The dictionary definition of 'effective' is 'capable of producing the desired result', however, the definition used in practice appears to depend on the mindset or reference point of the researcher. Most researchers reference point is management and therefore the definition of effectiveness is management's. It is possible that the definitions held by the job holders themselves, and by customers with whom they deal, are different from that of management. There is even less agreement on how effectiveness of an organisation or individual should be measured, i.e. what criteria should be used to measure effectiveness. More specific to the current study is sales person effectiveness research. There has been a large amount of research on effectiveness of sales people but it has tended to focus on industrial salespeople rather than retail salespeople. The research that has focused on retail sales people has suffered from several problems. The first relates to the problems with research involving effectiveness generally. The researchers rarely explain what they mean by effectiveness or what criteria they use to measure effectiveness. Much of this research also suffers methodologically, from the epistemological problem of being either too subjective or too objective. This is a problem that has plagued research in the social sciences throughout the subject's history. The methodologies used to research behaviour have been problematic in that they either adopt the methodologies of the natural sciences.in an attempt to quantify the phenomenon under study, or they use assumptions and methodologies that are subjective and prone to researcher or experimental bias. George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory claims to bridge this epistemological divide. The methodology allows for the indepth study of individuals but without bias from the researcher. By using the Repertory Grid technique developed by Kelly for the measurement of personal constructs, the results can be quantified, thus also satisfying the objectivist requirements. It is for this reason that Personal Construct Theory and the Repertory Grid technique are used in the current research. This research aims to discover whether the groups involved in the retail arena (i.e. top managers, branch manageresses, sales people and customers) have similar views of what constitutes sales person effectiveness.

The research aimed to gain an understanding of the self-perceptions of black South African professionals (and leaders) in relation to business leadership and how these self-perceptions influenced their behaviours, aspirations and self-perceived abilities in leadership positions. The leadership behaviour of black leaders was found to be influenced by their upbringing, educational background, workplace experiences and the country's historical context. Leadership behaviours exhibited by black leaders included Ubuntu, difficulty with owning authority, deliberate bias in management behaviour across colour and a profound sense of shared responsibility toward other black professionals and black communities. Black professionals demonstrated signs of deep-rooted pain, fear, anger, isolation, pride, empathy and general emotional fatigue stemming from workplace, socio-economic and political triggers that evoked generational trauma and an overall negative black lived experience. The negative lived experience could have led to racial identity dissonance and in extreme cases, complete racial identity disassociation. On occasion, black professionals leveraged white relationships to propel their careers forward, however, this practice reportedly resulted in feelings of self-doubt. Self-doubt was shown to eventually lead to self-deselection, negatively impacting the aspirations and career advancement prospects of black professionals in organisational leadership. Career progression of black professionals was additionally impacted by 'multiple shades of black', which determined if the black professional could be 'authorised' as a leader. These 'shades' included aspects such as the 'twang', complexion, and for black women, even hair. Black professionals that were perceived to better resemble 'whiteness', achieved faster career progression. The research found that black leaders perceived that their blackness, specifically, its unique texture of experiences and history in South Africa, provided them with superior empathetic leadership capability towards black employees, although it severely diminished empathy towards white employees. Furthermore, black professionals considered their blackness to detract from their leadership capability, by reducing the odds of being authorised as a natural leader, enforcing a skewed self-perception of their leadership capabilities.

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Corporate strategy has gained a lot of traction in academic discourse as a critical field that ensures organisational success and the role of informal structures in achieving this success has also gained a lot of focus. However, several scholars have pointed out that most of the studies on informal structures have used western and Asian socioecological narratives to contextualise informal structures. The contextual gap identified by the study and the assumptions by scholars that African, Asian and Western contexts have huge variances prompted the study to explore the contextual gap in South Africa. After defining the contextual gap, the critical question that the study sought to answer was; How are informal structures responding to corporate strategy within a South African context? To answer this question the study used an interpretive approach and a single case study to draw from the subjective experiences of 30 employees using in depth interviews. To ensure the abstraction of high-quality data the study utilised heterogeneous purposive sampling to draw insights from informed participants which in turn enabled the study to explore diversified perspectives. The study established that the socio ecological context of the organisation had both positive and negative influence on the employee's desire to accept or reject corporate strategy. The study established that the positive influence enabled smooth flow of information, flexibility, fulfilment of social needs and sharing of ideas. However, the study also established that the negative influence which manifested in resistance to corporate strategy, social fragmentation, conflict and political bickering outweighed the positive influence. The study concluded by adopting a strategic management model and extending it to contain the negative attributes of the socio-cultural environment with the hope that the model may enable the organisation to positively influence informal structures.