scholarly journals Managing diversity in Israel: Some applications for South Africa

1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
R. J. Petersen ◽  
L. P. Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Diverse Workforce ◽  
First Order ◽  
Managing Diversity ◽  
Individual Enterprise ◽  
National Economic ◽  
Interactive Nature ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Enterprise Level ◽  
The Individual

The management of diversity manifests itself in a very specific way in Israeli society. This is so because the management process occurs at two levels: a national-political level (first order processes) and the individual enterprise level (second order processes). The interactive nature of the two processes ultimately results in most diverse national groups working together productively towards both national-economic and individual goals. Inclusiveness is a property widely found in the average Israeli enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to describe the unique Israeli approach to the management of their diverse workforce, with a view to identifying possible applications for South Africa. The study shows that South Africa has a lot to learn before we can hope to succeed in effectively managing our diverse rainbow nation.

The development of innovations in organizations: the role of creative energy fields

Kybernetes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon-Arild Johannessen ◽  
Hugo Skaalsvik
Keyword(s):  
Global Economy ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Energy Field ◽  
Innovation Research ◽  
Individual Enterprise ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Enterprise Level ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose – One problem that many organisations face today in the global economy is that too few ideas are turned into innovations. The purpose of this paper is to show how innovations in organisations may be obtained by means of creative energy fields. Design/methodology/approach – The design employed in the research represents a holistic, change oriented approach to innovation, and the methodology is conceptual where an analytical model is used. Findings – The paper provides arguments that organisations need to develop creative energy fields in order to enhance their innovative capacity and performance. In the paper the construct creative energy field is conceptualised as “a spot in an organisation where a Group of creative individuals collaborate and work together in order to bring to surface new ideas which may fuel innovation processes and Development in organisations”. The paper shows that creative energy fields are influenced by five distinct components; those of making a clear purpose, planning after the results have become apparant, an organisation’s rule breakers, drawing a map that changes the landscape, and igniting the flame of innovation. Furthermore, the findings encompass three conditions which need to be present in an organisation in order to make creative energy fields work. Research limitations/implications – The carried out focuses on the individual organisation which aims to enhance innovation performance. Practical implications – In relation to practical implications, the paper shows, in particular, how an organisation may move into areas of innovation by means of a Lego system of organising. Originality/value – To the authors’ knowledge, the creation and use of a novel construct, that of creative energy fields, represents newness and originality in innovation research at the level of the individual enterprise. Furthermore, the paper contributes to the extant management knowledge of innovation by showing how a Lego system of organising may foster innovation at the enterprise level.

Individuals, Teams, and Organizational Benefits of Managing Diversity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddy Ng ◽  
Jacqueline Stephenson
Keyword(s):  
Direct Effect ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Diverse Workforce ◽  
Managing Diversity ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Organizational Benefits ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Organizational Levels ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Policies And Practices

Although the benefits of diversity are promising, research findings on its direct effect at various levels of the organization have been mixed. This chapter reviews existing research and documents how, when, and under what conditions diversity enhances performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels. We suggest that the positive effects of diversity on performance at all levels are present, but they are established only under the appropriate conditions. We identify several policies and practices which are effective at promoting a more diverse workforce as well as enhance the benefit of diversity. We conclude with suggestions for future research to extend our knowledge on the benefits that can be derived from a diverse workforce.

scholarly journals Accounting firms’ managers’ and trainees’ perceptions of managerial competencies required to manage diversity in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Msizi V. Mkhize
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Development Programme ◽  
Systematic Sampling ◽  
Job Descriptions ◽  
Management Competencies ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Accounting Firms ◽  
Managerial Competencies ◽  
Diverse Workforce ◽  
Managing Diversity

Background: In South Africa, there is a shortage of black chartered accountants, with some progress being made in transforming the industry. Accounting firms’ managers must be prepared to effectively manage the increasing diversity of the profession.Aim: The purpose of the study was to identify the managerial competencies required by accounting firms managers to effectively manage diversity in KwaZulu-Natal.Setting: The setting for this study is accounting firms in KwaZulu-Natal.Methods: A prospective, descriptive and analytical, cross-sectional design using systematic sampling was employed. The responses of 45 accounting firms’ managers and 114 trainees were analysed.Results: Both managers and trainees perceived the six managerial competencies important in managing diversity, but the ranking order of perceived importance indicated that there are variations in ratings. Teamwork and self-management competencies were highly rated by managers, while communication and teamwork competencies were highly rated by trainees.Conclusion: The managerial competencies are vital for the accounting firms’ managers. The study suggests that the accounting firms’ managers should consider the importance given by trainees and by themselves in prioritising the most important competencies they require in managing diversity. Accounting firms are encouraged to incorporate the six managerial competencies into the job descriptions or job advertisements and in the firms’ management development programme or training and development programme as the managerial competencies will assist managers in managing the diverse workforce effectively.

Concept and Metrics of Agricultural Diversification

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-95
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Zero Waste ◽  
Agricultural Diversification ◽  
Feed Production ◽  
Livestock Feed ◽  
Individual Enterprise ◽  
Farm Model ◽  
Enterprise Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Farm

This chapter presents some comparative analysis on agricultural diversification at the national and individual enterprise levels illustrating that although a country or region may have optimum diversification it may not translate into optimum diversification at the enterprise level to the disadvantage of farmers causing the national diversification to be unsustainable. This finding may strengthen the justification for an expanded model at the enterprise level to include integration of various aspects of production, such as crops, livestock, aquaculture, and soil and livestock feed production. The remaining chapters will identify and describe the various aspects and characteristics of the farm model from a practical perspective of an individual farm enterprise utilizing the model and demonstrating how to optimize farm waste to approach a zero waste scenario so that it can be instructive for various levels of uptake, including the individual farm enterprise level.

Fulfilling the Right to Food for South Africa: Justice, Security, Sovereignty and the Politics of Malnutrition

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 112-152
Author(s):  
Busiso Helard Moyo ◽  
Anne Marie Thompson Thow
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
Right To Food ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

Despite South Africa’s celebrated constitutional commitments that have expanded and deepened South Africa’s commitment to realise socio-economic rights, limited progress in implementing right to food policies stands to compromise the country’s developmental path. If not a deliberate policy choice, the persistence of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms is a deep policy failure.  Food system transformation in South Africa requires addressing wider issues of who controls the food supply, thus influencing the food chain and the food choices of the individual and communities. This paper examines three global rights-based paradigms – ‘food justice’, ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ – that inform activism on the right to food globally and their relevance to food system change in South Africa; for both fulfilling the right to food and addressing all forms of malnutrition. We conclude that the emerging concept of food sovereignty has important yet largely unexplored possibilities for democratically managing food systems for better health outcomes.

Stasis Anxiety

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Contemporary Writing

Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) theorisations of anxiety, discerns recursive investments in past experiences of hope (invoking Jennifer Wenzel’s work to consider the afterlives of anti-colonial prophecy), assesses the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of the ancient Greek understanding of stasis as civil war, and asks how these works’ elaboration of stasis might be understood in relation to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the eclipsing of the individual subject of political rights by the neoliberal subject whose very life is framed by its potential to be understood as capital.

Critical examination of various approaches used for analysing helical cables

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Raoof ◽  
I Kraincanic
Keyword(s):  
Large Diameter ◽  
Numerical Results ◽  
Hertzian Contact ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
First Order ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
End Conditions ◽  
Parametric Studies ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Fixed End

Using theoretical parametric studies covering a wide range of cable (and wire) diameters and lay angles, the range of validity of various approaches used for analysing helical cables are critically examined. Numerical results strongly suggest that for multi-layered steel strands with small wire/cable diameter ratios, the bending and torsional stiffnesses of the individual wires may safely be ignored when calculating the 2 × 2 matrix for strand axial/torsional stiffnesses. However, such bending and torsional wire stiffnesses are shown to be first order parameters in analysing the overall axial and torsional stiffnesses of, say, seven wire stands, especially under free-fixed end conditions with respect to torsional movements. Interwire contact deformations are shown to be of great importance in evaluating the axial and torsional stiffnesses of large diameter multi-layered steel strands. Their importance diminishes as the number of wires associated with smaller diameter cables decreases. Using a modified version of a previously reported theoretical model for analysing multilayered instrumentation cables, the importance of allowing for the influence of contact deformations in compliant layers on cable overall characteristics such as axial or torsional stiffnesses is demonstrated by theoretical numerical results. In particular, non-Hertzian contact formulations are used to obtain the interlayer compliances in instrumentation cables in preference to a previously reported model employing Hertzian theory with its associated limitations.

The Everyday in a Time of Transformation: Exploring a Single South African Lifeworld after 20 Years of Democracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
P. Conrad Kotze ◽  
Jan K. Coetzee
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Epistemological Framework

Transformation has come to be a defining characteristic of contemporary societies, while it has rarely been studied in a way that gives acknowledgement to both its societal effects and the experience thereof by the individual. This article discusses a recent study that attempts to do just that. The everyday life of a South African is explored within the context of changes that can be linked, more or less directly, to those that have characterized South Africa as a state since the end of apartheid in 1994. The study strives to avoid the pitfalls associated with either an empirical or solely constructivist appreciation of this phenomenon, but rather represents an integral onto-epistemological framework for the practice of sociological research. The illustrated framework is argued to facilitate an analysis of social reality that encompasses all aspects thereof, from the objectively given to the intersubjectively constructed and subjectively constituted. While not requiring extensive development on the theoretical or methodological level, the possibility of carrying out such an integral study is highlighted as being comfortably within the capabilities of sociology as a discipline. While the article sheds light on the experience of transformation, it is also intended to contribute to the contemporary debate surrounding the current “ontological turn” within the social sciences.

scholarly journals Review: Van den Heuvel-Panhuizen M, Kuehne C & Lombard A-P. 2014. Learning Pathway for Number in the Early Primary Grades. South Africa.

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Mike Askew
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Primary Grades ◽  
The Social ◽  
Early Primary ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

<p>I cringe at the fashion of reducing everything to a set of discrete points – ‘the five keys to eternal happiness’, ‘twenty-seven ways to beat procrastination’ – yet find myself attracted to the 4 E’s model of cognition: that cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Far yet from being a coherent model in the sense of general agreement over what each of these terms means, and despite sounding reductionist, the model seems to have traction through bringing together differing theoretical positions and suggesting that cognition cannot be accounted for by just one of them.<br />For example, Lakoff &amp; Núñez (2000) argue for embodied origins of mathematics, but the power of mathematics also resides in the way that it extends our ‘natural’ understandings. And while the Vygotskian position of cognition arising from the move from the interpersonal – the embedded and enactive – to the intrapersonal is popular, it seems to lack explanatory power about how it is that what originates between people comes to be located within the individual. The proprioceptor emphasis of embodied theories (that cognition originates through our literal, common senses of position and the movement of our bodies in space) has, I think, potential to unlock this connection between the social and individual.</p>

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