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South Africa’s entry into the 1990s has been dramatic. Changes are taking place on political, social and economic fronts at an increasingly rapid pace and past practices are being openly challenged. Changes invoke concerns, fears and hopes. Rather than resisting the reform process, one must concentrate on managing it. The changes taking place in South Africa at present have influenced all people in some or other way. The nature and consequences of this process of changes are, as yet, not fully understood.

This paper explores the impact of affirmative action on the culture of small business enterprises in South Africa. The functions of organizational culture are explored and utilized to reach a deeper understanding of the desired impact of affirmative action. Managers are identified as holding key roles as change agents. Recommendations include managing change from a culture perspective directed at creating participative management processes and shifting the enterprise’s essential values.

South Africa’s entry into the 1990s was dramatic. Change has become a reality and change always implies both opportunities and threats. The new government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) being a statement of intent, outlines definite principles in promoting small, medium and micro enterprise (SMMEs) in South Africa. South Africa has undeniably for many years been foremost among the world’s most deeply polarized and pathologically stressed societies. Affirmative action presupposes and follows on equal opportunity and should therefore be a supplement rather than a substitute for equal opportunity. Focuses on challenges facing SMMEs in South Africa amid present changes and resistance to change. Reflects the major trends of an explorative study just completed countrywide and provides some guidelines for transformational and visionary leadership.

This paper seeks to provide guidance on specific ways by which organizations can overcome resistance by matching readiness strategies with forms of resistance.

The paper summarizes literature on resistance to change and readiness to change, leading to the development of specific recommendations for reducing resistance through specific readiness strategies.

Resistance, though common, may be more effectively managed if specific readiness strategies are matched with requisite sources of resistance.

The paper provides guidance on addressing primary sources of resistance by matching them with specific elements proposed by Armenakis et al. that lead to readiness for change.

The synthesis of literature related to creating readiness for change and resistance to change leads to a resistance to change typology, including three domains. While these domains have been addressed in change literature, the paper further expands on these domains by offering potential sources of resistances within each domain. This should lead to future research that explores these domains and sources within each domain in greater depth.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the difference in the process of higher education (HE) internationalization across faculties in a post‐1992 university and to identify faculty‐specific factors through evaluating the four faculties in the case study.

A qualitative research is conducted in a post‐1992 UK university. Four faculties are involved and a total of 20 interviewees from three key departments participate in this project. Content analysis, critical discourse analysis and categorization of meaning are adopted as data analysis strategies.

This study explains the reasons why the level of internationalization across faculties is different.

This research helps gain rich understanding of faculty‐specific factors in terms of the degree of internationalization. Further research in this area is encouraged to test these faculty‐specific factors through quantitative population studies in other institutions.

Most faculty‐specific factors are management matters which can be improved by internal adjustment. HE internationalization cannot be conducted the same way in each faculty, but should be considered a part of faculties’ particular focus. These factors highlight the areas where the faculties need to improve, in order to better accommodate HE internationalization.

This research evaluates and identifies the faculty‐specific factors in relation to the level of internationalization from a faculty's standpoint. These critical factors are unique to HE internationalization and transferrable to other similar institutions.

This paper aims to establish the extent to which small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in Gauteng, South Africa involve business social responsibility (BSR) in their practices. It also aims to bring awareness of the importance that BSR has amongst SMEs. The objectives are to measure the involvement of SME's BSR on management performance, identify strengths and areas that need improvement of BSR and expose the potential usefulness of BSR in South African SMEs.

A quantitative comparative design was used to collect primary data from 326 respondents from 64 randomly selected SMEs in the study area. Structured interviews were used.

The findings revealed that SMEs in Gauteng had performed worst in the area of BSR out of the ten management performance scores measured. The study further found that most owner‐managers of the sampled businesses had university qualifications and most of these businesses had passed the survival stage.

The study excluded major components of BSR, and cannot be generalized to the remaining eight provinces.

It is recommended that SMEs in the study area strengthen BSR as a marketing tool to grow their businesses. Furthermore, SMEs researchers should focus on bringing the benefits of BSR to SMEs operations.

Many SMEs seem to understand that BSR is to be carried out only by large enterprises. This study exposes Gauteng SMEs to BSR since those that incorporated BSR in their operations were not doing enough.

The purpose of this research is to identify and critically evaluate key issues faced by an institution in the quest to implement higher education internationalization.

A qualitative research is conducted in a post‐1992 UK university. A total of 20 interviewees from three key departments participated in this project. Content analysis, critical discourse analysis and categorisation of meaning were applied on analysing three sources of data collection.

This study identifies critical issues that impede international strategy implementation within an institutional context. These issues include resource allocation, communication, operational process, cooperation and coordination, organizational culture, resistance to change, student support and external environment. Researching findings indicate that most issues are rooted internally. Higher education (HE) internationalization is deemed to be integration and cohesion.

This research contributes to rich understanding of challenges of the present case study; therefore, further research in this area is encouraged to test these highlighted issues through quantitative population studies in other institutions.

Research findings show different understanding of critical issues of HE internationalization, and highlight the areas that need to be improved. This study encourages different key departments to conduct and evaluate internationalization internally.

This research suggests that HE internationalization is primarily an internal matter of integration rather than a process driven only by external environment. This study addresses particular forms of critical issues within an institutional context through a qualitative analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare the influence of three strategy‐making modes (planned, adaptive and entrepreneurial) on IT‐business strategy alignment in small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).

Empirical research using a questionnaire was conducted. In total, 108 SME owners and managers participated in the study and the data were analysed using quantitative techniques.

The planned mode provided better results as predicted. Each strategy‐making mode was found to influence certain specific aspects of alignment and performance. For instance the planned mode ensures better understanding of business and IT objectives and provides high growth sales. The adaptive mode encourages participation of stakeholders in planning and improves communication and staff productivity. The entrepreneurial mode can facilitate immediate revision of plans in organizations operating in dynamic and competitive environment.

Many factors influencing alignment were excluded. Second, the study was conducted in only three provinces and excluded the views of staff and IT personnel. These limit generalization of findings.

Assistance in planning and access to support programmes are necessary. Understanding the impact of SME characteristics can also assist the government in prioritizing resource allocations and focusing development programmes. The inconclusive results of this study, the impact on alignment of practices such as corporate governance, use of the balanced scorecard, and affirmative action should be researched further.

This was the first attempt to investigate the relationship between strategy‐making practices and IT alignment in South African SMEs. It provides empirical evidence confirming that these practices influence specific aspects of alignment and performance. SME managers can adopt the approach used to identify practices that ensure better alignment.

This study examines the mediation effects of leaders' communication competency in the link between leadership styles (i.e. servant and transactional leadership) and employees' work engagement.

Cross-sectional survey data from 392 employees in 33 hotels in Bangladesh were collected. To analyze the data, structural equation modeling was adopted, and partial least squares (PLS) analysis was used.

Results of PLS analysis revealed that servant leaders and leaders' communication competency positively influence employees' work engagement. In boosting employees' work engagement, communication competency is an important tool for servant leadership but not for transactional leadership.

Hoteliers and managers may want to adopt a servant leadership style and develop effective leadership communication skills to increase employees' engagement at work.

This study introduces communication competency as a mediating mechanism between leadership styles and work engagement in the hospitality industry.