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>
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