The perceptual impact of enterprise development on mining communities in South Africa
Date
2017
Authors
Mthabini, Owen
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Abstract
The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment’s (BBBEE’s) enterprise
development practice is one of the tools employed by the South African government
in an attempt to redress the country’s past economic injustices that are a result of
apartheid’s discriminatory economic segregationist policies. This research undertook
to study the perceptual impact of BBBEE’s enterprise development in mining
communities, by focusing on black entrepreneurs and the support they receive from
mining companies – or lack thereof – according to the BBBEE’s codes of good
conduct. The support that mining companies provide to mining community
entrepreneurs could have come in the form of, inter alia,business funding, business
incubation, granting guarantees for business loans and business coaching. The study
took apositivist approach with data collected using aquestionnaire. The research
findings indicate that mining community entrepreneurs do not feel that mining
companies provide business support, therefore leading to the conclusion that
BBBEE’s enterprise development does not fulfil its objective of redressing South
Africa’s past economic injustices by supporting black entrepreneurs.
The research took a positivist paradigm in that data collection was quantitative. A
positivist approach is viewed as a scientific, rational and empirical way of gathering
data that is in turn used in knowledge construction (Ryan, 2006). The research
design was cross-sectional because the researcher intended to study the perceptual
impact of enterprise development on mining communities over a long time without
having to make observations over many years. A cross-sectional study is the
observation of subjects at one stage of an external intervention process to determine
the impact of, for example, intervention by a third party or exposure to a third party.
The population involved in this study was made up of black male and female
entrepreneurs 18 years old or older, from three mining towns situated in following
three provinces: Mpumalanga, Gauteng and the North West province. The research
instrument was research questionnaire in the form of a five-point Likert scale. The
limitation in this study was the limited population sample of 127 respondents from
only three provinces, as they can’t be representative of the entire South African
mining communities’ population.
Description
A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management,
University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree
of Master of Management in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation.
Johannesburg, 2017
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Citation
Mthabini, Owen (2017) The perceptual impact of enterprise development on mining communities in South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <http://hdl.handle.net/10539/23443>