M.B.A. / The Black enterprise sector in South Africa has, despite a long history of exclusion and restriction, substantial potential to help distribute employment, income, and wealth more equitably between whites and blacks. This report summarizes research on the subject and attempts to evaluate realistically the potential role that small black enterprise can play in this effort. It also examines the challenges and constraints that face small black businesses. South Africa's small black business is highly constrained by the restrictions that apartheid placed on the establishment of businesses, on the opportunities for skilled employment, and on the educational opportunities for blacks as well as by the restrictions affecting the spatial arrangement of cities (Riley, 1993: ix) Despite severe constrains, evidence of dynamic growth does exist, notably among small light manufacturing enterprises, whose incomes and employment are above averages for the sector. Also, the incomes of even the most survival-level businesses are critical to the survival of many households. The small black businesses has two distinct roles that deserve to be supported in any project or policy intervention: it is a residual employer with an important role to play in improving welfare and alleviating poverty, and it is a source of dynamic and potentially dynamic firms that create wealth and generate employment. (Riley, 1993: ix) Since the dawn of democracy in South Africa in April 1994, the government has come up with concerted efforts to create a conducive environment for developing Small, Medium, and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs), particularly from historically disadvantage individuals (Petje: i) Approach chosen for the study was to personally interview eight respondents both from established business and black small businesses with the aid of a structured interview schedule. Questions were open ended and allowed for self expression by the respondents. The nature of the research was to be investigative rather than to provide statistical measure of dependency.

No description available.

M.Comm. / Towards addressing the detrimental economic effects past dispensations had on the marginalized majority, different Government initiatives and other interventions have been put in place to encourage the participation of Blacks in the economy of South Africa. These development initiatives seek to address poverty and unemployment levels, some focussing on growing small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMMEs). Growth and sustainability of such businesses can only be achieved through the maintenance of appropriate financial information, on which economic decisions are based, but such information can only be generated or processed if relevant and adequate accounting data, through accounting recordkeeping, are maintained. The study examines whether this is also applicable to micro or survivalist businesses, and was carried out to investigate the accounting records maintained by small Black-owned businesses in QwaQwa. In the literature study it became vital to elucidate the uniqueness of micro and survivalist businesses as they are often generalised under the rather broad umbrella of the term ‘SMMEs’. The literature further indicates that there is no prescribed regulation or framework specifically for accounting recordkeeping in micro and survivalist businesses. The dissertation analyses responses to questionnaires administered to a purposively selected sample of 88 small Black-owned businesses in QwaQwa, and interpreting 44 respondents interviewed. The interviews became necessary due to insufficient responses to the section in the questionnaires addressing the third research objective. Hence, both a quantitative and a qualitative research design were eventually used. Data collection took place at respondents’ business premises. Responses to the questionnaires were analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), which was used to generate descriptive statistics. The researcher documented the interview proceedings in written format. Common responses from interviews were clustered in themes then interpreted. Results show that small Black-business owners maintain some basic form of accounting records such as sales records, payment records and stock records, however, since they operate mainly on the cash basis, debtors’ and creditors’ records were seldom maintained. These findings are consistent with previous studies into the kind of accounting records maintained by small businesses. Small Black-business owners also perceived maintaining accounting records to be important in determining the profitability and future sustainability of their businesses. These owners, however, demonstrated limited understanding of accounting concepts and principles or how these applied to their business. They identified a need for some form of interventions to improve their knowledge of accounting recordkeeping and risk management. A further need identified was the availability of funds to finance their businesses. Therefore, financial help together with training and development are needed to better their businesses. This may go a long way in improving growth and stability, as well as reducing the poverty and unemployment rate in the country. In order for micro and survivalist business owners to realise some of the benefits of maintaining relevant accounting records, it is recommended that the owners are trained on how to keep basic accounting records that are useful and easy to convert into accounting information, and that may add value to their businesses and ensure the monitoring of profitability and sustainable growth.

The overall purpose of this study is to determine the impact of social media on customer trust in small e-businesses. In addition, this research study seeks to find answers in particular on the level of improvement or enhancement, if any, that the use of social media has on consumer trust. Trust is an essential aspect in any business regardless of its size. Trust is what drives customers to purchase vendor products and services. In this digital age, small e-businesses are selling their products online. However, the lack of trust has been a major concern and a contributing factor to small businesses’ failures. This research uses a mixed-methods research design, utilizing two different approaches both qualitative and quantitative methods used alongside of each other. The first part of our findings presents the qualitative results from the interviews with a number of small e-businesses owners, and the second part shows the quantitative results from online surveys with the consumers. With the analysis of the two components of the study based on the results from the responses of the small e-business owners and the online consumers, we can infer that social media marketing has indeed greatly affected and changed the present small e-businesses trends. Our findings indicate that social media is at the present used as a trustworthy reference to gather information about the products and services of small e-businesses. The power of social media has also allowed customers and small e-businesses owners to build relationships and establish trust from their constant communication.

PhDRDV / Institute for Rural Development / In South Africa, various government and private sector-led initiatives have been directed towards promoting youth involvement in small retail businesses. This was designed to counter the high unemployment and poverty rates among youth. However, high failure rates of the initiatives consistently frustrate these noble efforts. Even though this is the case, neither attributes of youth-run small retail business resilience nor the factors that predispose them to the high failure rates are well-known. This situation demands taking urgent action to foster resilience in the youth-run small retail business sector. Thus, the current study focused on identifying the major threats and strengths to business and determining a set of objective criteria and indices for use in measuring resilience. Potential resilience strategies were also sought. The study was conducted in Vhembe District of Limpopo Province in South Africa. An explorative mixed research approach was employed. Participants were selected using both snowball and cluster sampling procedures. Data were collected using semi-structured interview guides and questionnaires. Qualitative data were analysed using Atlas ti version 8 software techniques such as network diagrams and code primary document tables. For each objective, in-depth results were obtained, further interrogated in a survey and analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences software (IBM SPSS; version 25) in the subsequent phase. The main statistical techniques utilised were Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Significance was determined at P< 0.5. Results from PCA test reviewed three major threats to small retail business resilience that included poor infrastructure (28.54 %), financial infrastructure (20.97 %) and competition (14.94 %). The three factor structure accounted for a total variance of 64.46 %. Poor infrastructure and financial inadequacy threats did not vary with distance from the urban area (P > 0.05) while competition significantly varied with distance from the urban area (P< 0.05). With regard to strengths, PCA analysis produced a four factor structure that explained a total variance of 54.59 %. The four major strengths included marketing ability (16.97 %), good customer care (14.42 %), business knowledge (12.08 %) and commitment (11.13 %). A six dimension criteria for measuring small retail business resilience was established using PCA. The six dimensions encompassed security measures (18.01 %), outsourcing abilities (13. 70 %), marketing strategies (10.07), risk management (8.54 %), financial management (8.43 %) and innovation (7.89 %). The six factor structure explained a total variance of 66.67 %. These resilience pillars were related to threat detection, prevention and adaptation business mechanisms. Four resilience dimensions (security measures, marketing abilities, risk management and innovation) were similar across distance variations from the urban area (P> 0.05). However, significant differences between urban and rural areas were observed in two variables, that is, joining business alliances (P=0.012) linked to outsourcing abilities and keeping money away from the business premise (P=0.034) associated with financial management. Resilience indices were further developed utilising the six building blocks of the criteria. The indices for measuring small retail business resilience were expressed in the formula: R1= ƒ (SM1, OA1, MS1, RM1, FM1, I1, S1) + e where SM=Security Measures; OA= Outsourcing Abilities; MS= Marketing Strategies; OM=Risk Management; FM= Financial Management; I= Innovation; S= Subjective resilience dimensions and 1= particular time; e= error. The assumption underpinning these indices was that, small retail business resilience is not observable and thus it can be measured through assessing each dimension separately at a particular time. The outcomes reflected that, measuring youth-owned small retail businesses resilience encompasses a clear understanding of area specific threats and the subsequent customised performance measures. Resilience dimensions may change with time due to socio-economic changes, government policies and local conditions. As such, it is crucial to constantly assess youth small retail businesses in order to determine their current status and changes in resilience components. Current strategies and potential interventions for promoting small business resilience were also reviewed. Small retailers were currently utilising strategies such as business collaboration, specialisation and stock diversification. To, address the weaknesses associated with presently utilised strategies, potential interventions that encompassed financial support, provision of cheap stands, need for financial assistance and provision of business training and infrastructure upgrades were proposed. The present study provided a criteria and resilience indices that can be used by policy implementers, development agencies and funders to determine resilience drivers, monitor changes in resilience attributes over time and identify necessary interventions in the small retail sector. This assists decision makers to make pre-informed decisions before providing support to youth small retailers. The use of participatory research methods in the present study helped to ground the work in the youth small retail sector and thus, contributing to community engagement practices. The use of mixed study approaches has been consistently recommended in studies related to resilience measurement methods. As a result, the mixed research methods utilised in the present study provides directions for future replication in studies aimed at developing approaches for measuring resilience in the small business sector. Lastly, the simplicity of the criteria and indices make it easier for small retail business owners and other practitioners to use in future. / NRF

Food processing micro- and small-scale enterprises (MSEs) play an important role in the national economic development of Tanzania. Though many of them have great growth potential, they face a number of constraints hindering further development, and large amounts of cooking oil are imported each year. The aim of thesis has therefore been to identify and analyse the different factors affecting these MSEs in order to find out which the major growth challenges are. The case study is mainly based on individual semi-structured interviews with sunflower oil processors and farmers in Babati districts, conducted in February and March 2016, and earlier research and studies on the topic of MSE growth make up the theoretical framework used for analysis of the data. The findings show that there are indeed numerous challenges facing these processors, and the major constraint was found to be lack of capital; an issue causing or worsening a majority of the other challenges at hand. Other problems are related to raw material, equipment &amp; electricity for processing, regulations, market accessibility, and competition. These obstacles need to be overcome in order to enable the industry's expansion within and outside of Tanzania, and further research is recommended.

Small businesses have an important role to play in the U.S. economy. However, employee fraud can jeopardize the sustainability of small businesses. Grounded on Cressey's fraud triangle theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies used by selected managers and owners of small retail businesses to detect and prevent employee fraud. Ten participants from 5 small retail businesses participated in the study. Nine participated in a face-to-face semistructured interview, and 1 participated in a telephone interview. These participants included 5 owners and 5 managers of small retail businesses in the state of Michigan in the United States who have implemented strategies to detect and prevent employee fraud. Through a process of methodological triangulation, casual observations and documentary evidence supplemented data collected through semistructured interviews. Using thematic analysis by coding narrative segments, the research findings included themes of controls and communication, cash register accountability, segregation of duties, monitoring, and action against perpetrators. Managers and owners of small businesses may benefit from the findings of this study by gaining awareness of the need to detect and prevent employee fraud. The implications for positive social change may include the potential to increase appropriate controls over employee fraud, thus enabling owners of small retail business an opportunity to operate effectively and efficiently, which could increase employment opportunities. Increased employment opportunities could create a positive effect on other small retail businesses and allow local communities to prosper.

In industry, energy efficiency reduces operating cost and emissions to the environment whiles enhancing energy security. In order to ensure the sustainability of micro and small scale businesses in a developing country such as Ghana, measures that can ensure energy efficiency are therefore essential for these businesses to have a productive and economical operation that will ensure their sustainability. In this study, the potential of energy efficiency measures for micro and small scale businesses have been examined by performing industrial energy systems analysis on some selected micro and small scale businesses in Kumasi-Ghana through a practical study and administering of questionnaire about their energy consumption. Legislative instruments that are linked with energy use in Ghana were looked into. Some possible energy efficiency measures that could be adopted by these businesses have been analyzed. In this study it is established that energy supply to these businesses is not reliable and it is continuously becoming expensive. In addition, other findings were that value could be added to the processes of these businesses if they incorporate energy efficiency measures in their operations. The main driving force that will encourage these businesses to incorporate energy efficiency measures in their operation is the energy prices increase; therefore, their interest is the measures that could reduce their energy cost rather than the positive impacts that will come to the environment. In doing this renewable energy has the greatest potential in ensuring energy efficiency to these businesses. Finally, it is established that there are no specific legislations on energy use that will bring negative effects to these businesses and this could create enabling environment for private investors of energy efficiency.

Social media is a very important marketing channel for marketers. Marketing through social media can easily enhance the effects of viral marketing or accelerate the word-of-mouth effect. How small e-stores and startups that lack marketing resources conduct their online marketing strategies and overcome their marketing weaknesses are the points of interest in this research. This research examines how new online shops implement marketing strategies using social media. Our samples come from the E-commerce Idea Competition of 2009 and 2010. The students who participate in this competition only have two months to operate their online stores so that they can be taken as typical samples of new online shops. We encode 141 online shops¡¦ contents, including their final reports and website contents of blogs, Facebook, micro-blogs and YouTube. We use the content analysis method to analyze the dimensions of product information, trust messages, promotions, interactivities, multimedia contents and brand stories. This research is to answer two research questions. The first research question asked is how small e-stores implement their marketing strategies using social media. The findings show that information is exposed more completely in blogs because of the students¡¦ familiarity with blog platforms and the variety of information that it can handle. Promotions information such as special offers is the most commonly used information pattern on social media. The second research question is how the e-stores enhance and overcome marketing weaknesses in using social media. We found out that trust messages are seldom used in social media and only a few promotions skills were used. These are caused by the time constraints and the unfamiliarity with social media. From the results, it was shown that these students used very limited resources in implementing their marketing strategies. Analyzing the contents of the social media can give us a better understanding of the behavior and strategies of small e-stores and startups. To overcome these weaknesses, it is suggested that the features of the social media they want to use be studied first and to reduce the numbers of social media usage to become more familiar with the social media platform. The current study found what the operating characteristics of small e-stores and startups are and some suggestions are given to strengthen their weaknesses and establish long-term businesses. We hope that these suggestions can be applied to the e-commerce environment so that future startups can have a better working understanding of marketing using the social media.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:32:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Adriana Agnes Magalhaes Rodrigues.pdf: 956857 bytes, checksum: 3f7beae0c5e2a084d18d81912001ff61 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-11-10 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / The present work consists in a qualitative study on common brazilian workers that, taken by the unemployment circumstances produced by productive restructuration, turned themselves into owners of small family businesses that generate income. It also can be described as a study on how different people build their daily survival, constituting themselves. It is a study which intends to clarify the way these people live and survive, mostly of them ruled by the state of poverty. From a discussion on the knowledge, the present study aimed at identifying the meanings of self-employment in small family businesses that generate income, found in the narratives of the study participants and in the field-theme. By field-theme, comprehending everything that refers to a subject, a debate without limits or boundaries. In this field emerged themes like: self-employment, microcredit, entrepreneurship, family businesses and popular economy, which together built a fruitful field of discussion and construction of knowledge. Oral history was used to include in the debate the knowledge and life experience of the five interviewees, whose narratives were submitted to the method of discourse analysis. The problems that conducted the study concern the possibility of an ecology of knowledge on the understanding of the meanings of family self-employment, analyzing ideological processes presents in the field and possibilities of emancipation. By ecology of knowledge, comprehending a system of knowledge from different origins, not just scientific, which coexist on the construction of a different society, its a term used by Boaventura de Souza Santos. The identification of the meanings of family self-employment by the voices of those present in the field allowed questioning the general notion linked to entrepreneurship. Concluding that the term entrepreneurship is used as a government strategy to keep the status quo and avoid social conflicts, by spreading that the solution for unemployment is to become an entrepreneur. This speech prioritizes the individualism and must be elucidated, so when people choose self-employment, they do it consciously, as a possible life strategy, not deluded by the speech of being your own boss as an opportunity of success / Trata-se de um estudo qualitativo sobre trabalhadores (as) brasileiros (as) comuns que, levados pelo desemprego produzido pelas transformações no mercado de trabalho, transformaram-se em proprietários (as) de pequenos negócios familiares geradores de renda. Pode ser descrito também como um estudo sobre maneiras como diferentes pessoas constroem a sobrevivência diária, constituindo a si mesmos. É um estudo que se propõe a dar visibilidade aos modos de viver e sobreviver dessas pessoas em sua maioria regida pela situação de pobreza. A partir de uma discussão sobre o conhecimento, o presente estudo teve como objetivo a identificação dos sentidos do auto-emprego em pequenos negócios familiares geradores de renda, presentes nas narrativas dos participantes do estudo e no campo-tema. Por campo-tema, compreende-se tudo o que remete a um assunto, um debate sem limites e sem fronteiras. Nesse campo emergiram temas como: auto-emprego, microcrédito, empreendedorismo, empresas familiares e economia popular que juntos construíram um profícuo campo de discussão e construção do conhecimento. Utilizou-se a história oral para fazer presente no debate o conhecimento e a experiência de vida dos cinco participantes entrevistados, cujas narrativas foram submetidas ao método da análise do discurso. A problemática que dirigiu o estudo diz respeito à possibilidade de uma ecologia de saberes na apreensão dos sentidos do auto-emprego em família, analisando processos ideológicos presentes no campo e possibilidades de emancipação. Por ecologia de saberes entende-se um sistema de saberes, de origens diferentes e não apenas científicos que coexistem na busca da construção de uma sociedade diferente, termo utilizado por Boaventura de Souza Santos. A identificação dos sentidos do auto-emprego em família pelas vozes presentes no campo permitiu problematizar a noção geral circulante vinculada ao empreendedorismo. Conclui-se que o termo empreendedorismo é utilizado como uma estratégia de governo no sentido de manter o status quo e evitar o conflito social ao propagar que a solução para o desemprego é se tornar um empreendedor. Esse discurso prioriza o individualismo e deve ser elucidado, de modo que as pessoas ao optarem pelo auto-emprego o façam conscientemente como possibilidade de estratégia de vida e não iludidas pelo discurso do ser seu próprio patrão como oportunidade de sucesso