Bibliography: leaves 181-200. / In line with global trends in the economy, the service industry is making an increasingly important contribution to South Africa's economy. In order to stay competitive in both the international and national economies, service organisations in South Africa face numerous challenges that have resulted from a country living through 40 years of Apartheid. A key challenge is the lack of skilled labour at both managerial and worker levels in organisations compounded by the need to manage a highly diverse workforce with different needs and expectations. Frontline employees form an integral part of the service offering of any service organisation and they carry the responsibility of projecting the image of the organisation and of creating a satisfying service experience for the customer. Service organisations can gain competitive advantage through the effective mobilisation of these employees through high quality human resource management practices. This study aims to investigate the link between human resource management (HRM) practices in service organisations in South Africa and the service-orientated behaviour of frontline employees and the role played by organisational commitment in this relationship. Seven HRM practices were investigated, namely selection, training and human resource development, pay and rewards, performance appraisal and management support. The study focused on three service industries in South Africa, namely hospitality, retail and car rental. The four South African organisations that participated in the research are currently regarded as market leaders in each of their industries.

Includes abstract. / Includes references. / Research has examined various factors that may inhibit the career progress of females but, as far as the researcher has been able to ascertain, STTUC has not been sufficiently investigated as a factor that may hamper such progress. This study suggests such a focus because the work setting constantly places individuals in positions where they are obliged to present their abilities and/or achievements. In order to address the evident gap in existing research, this study investigated the STTUC framework within the organisational context in Botswana, Africa. The main aim of this study was to investigate the antecedents of STTUC and to explore gender differences in the STTUC experiences of black employees in Botswana. The antecedents explored included individual characteristics (specifically, collectivistic cultural orientation, traditional gender role orientation, affiliative needs, interpersonal sensitivity and competitiveness), family-work variables (specifically, instrumental support from the spouse/partner and family-work conflict), and organisational variables (focusing specifically on masculine values within the organisational culture).

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This empirical study investigates the extent to which Ugandan fish and flower exporters are creating value and increasing their profitability through innovation activity and whether or not they are improving their ability to manage innovation projects effectively. It applied a mixed-methodological approach using a survey questionnaire and semistructured in-depth interviews administered on production, quality control, marketing and financial managers. It used primary and secondary data to develop financial models to estimate operating profits from different combinations of product, process and marketing innovations at industry and company levels. Empirical evidence shows that the lines of business that are associated with the highest profitability in one period change over time, thus confirming the need for and potential benefits to be gained from innovation.

Bibliography: leaves 304-346. / The purpose of this study was to evaluate the implications of tax competition with specific reference to commodity and capital income taxation. From a theoretical perspective, tax competition can be explained as a process that involves various measures or strategies that governments can take on the same but also different levels to adjust their tax bases and/or rates (tax systems), in order to attract mobile factors of production from other regions. The alternative of tax coordination and harmonisation to tax competition, as applied in developed regions, and partial pursuit in some developing regions was also analysed.

Includes bibliographical references. / Waste management generally in South Africa is poorly defined and practised, and the inadequate management of health care waste (HCW) has been recognised by the South African government as a significant environmental and public health risk. The literature revealed that an integrated health care waste information system (IHCWIS) serves as an important intervention to address the issue of poor health care waste management (HCWM). The overall key research question which this research asked was: "How does an IHCWIS develop and become institutionalised among health care waste generators?" The aim of the research was to gather empirical data to understand how the development and institutionalisation of an IHCWIS contributes to effective HCWM.

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.