Commercial trading in various formats has characterised relations between humans for centuries. However, in a world driven by higher levels of consumption, and where citizens demand higher returns for their hard-earned taxes, governments are becoming more active in ensuring favourable conditions for their own enterprises, either operating or seeking to operate, in foreign markets, as well as local enterprises that seek to extract value from foreign markets. The past failure of the markets to self-regulate, with the recent events of the 2008/09 market crash, gave fresh impetus for governments to play a more active role in ensuring favourable outcomes for their local economies. To be effective, requires the deployments of capable officials to fulfil this mandate. However, given that governments have traditionally not operated in the sphere of what is termed as ‘commercial diplomacy’, it is evident that a concerted effort needs to be made to have a skilled and capable workforce which can function in both the commercial and diplomatic market spaces across the world. Against the background sketched above, the South African government, with the dti spearheading the initiative, has been running capacity building programmes to train officials as designate FERs, to function as commercial diplomats in targeted foreign markets. This contrasts with its sister-department, DIRCO, which has established 126 foreign missions focusing on political diplomacy. Anecdotal evidence, and previous capacity building reports, have highlighted the need for a framework to regulate and inform the development of officials. Due to the framework’s broader focus, and the acknowledgement of the rich experiences of the officials being trained in the programme, it has been termed as capacity development. An initial review of the topic, revealed that there had been limited research into a framework that regulates the capacity development of foreign economic representatives (FERs), the term used for commercial diplomats of the South African government. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore a capacity development framework (CDF) for South African FERs. This exploratory capacity development framework will then be tested, to inform the capacity development programme used for the training of designated FERs. To achieve this goal, a literature review of academic sources of information regarding the concepts of commercial diplomacy, capacity development and conceptual frameworks, was conducted. This led to the development of a qualitative questionnaire which was then distributed to all currently posted (27) and returned FERs (33), with 18 completed questionnaires returned. The questionnaire contained both closed and open-ended statements that delved deeper into the experiences and opinions held by the respondents. Using the dti as a case study, the content analysis method, which uses open coding, was applied to identify the theme and codes emanating from the data. This was assessed against the research questions (RQs) constructed in the research proposal, and was found to be in line with the sentiments flowing from the research data. The theme, indicated as capacity development and its concomitant codes (Process, Content, Technology and Management Support), thus formed the basis and skeleton of the exploratory capacity development framework. The codes were further analysed and sub-codes identified, which were incorporated into the exploratory capacity development framework. The analysis further revealed that, while the dti is committed to ensuring the designate FERs are adequately capacitated before being posted, much more could be done to improve the efficacy of the training provided. To this end, a number of gaps were identified from the data and these will need to be addressed to ensure that an effective capacity development programme is developed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nmmu/vital:27210 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Williams, Mario Rene |
| Publisher | Nelson Mandela University, Faculty of Business and Economic Sciences |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Masters, MBA |
| Format | xv, 129 leaves, pdf |
| Rights | Nelson Mandela University |
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