Unisa Press Journals (University of South Africa)
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Selected Psychological Factors Predicting Customer Citizenship Behaviours: An Environmentally Friendly Context
No full textPurpose: Viable business opportunities may be lost when customers revert to unsuitable brands owing to the misreading of brand label information or a lack of understanding of the quality and value of the focal business’s green product offering. Accordingly, this research seeks to advance understanding of selected psychological factors influencing customer citizenship advocacy and personal initiative behaviours in an environmentally friendly context that may aid fellow customers in making more informed and responsible purchase decisions.
Design/Methodology/Approach: A research model was examined, assessing the influence of green attitude, consumer self-confidence, and self-control against criticism on customer citizenship advocacy and personal initiative behaviours in an environmentally friendly context. Survey research was conducted among customers in South Africa who had previously advised others to avoid products that may be harmful to society. Structural equation modelling was applied in the assessment of the research data and to conclude on the hypotheses formulated.
Findings: All hypothesised relationships were supported, except for the relationship between self-control against criticism and personal initiative behaviours.
Originality: Novel insight is provided into the extent to which green attitude, as well as psychological factors relating to how customers perceive and regulate themselves during their interactions with other customers, may influence customer citizenship advocacy and personal initiative behaviours in an environmentally friendly context. Accordingly, the model offers a starting point for green manufacturing businesses and policymakers to develop programmes that may facilitate the desired customer citizenship behaviours, which could contribute to fellow customers purchasing quality green products
Enhancing Domestic Revenue Mobilisation with a National Tax Lottery: Prospects for Consumer Acceptance and Engagement
No full textPurpose: Transitional and developing countries need to boost revenue collection by improving citizens’ tax compliance. This research explores potential consumer acceptance of and engagement with a tax lottery system designed to improve domestic revenue mobilisation by targeting non-compliant businesses. Various countries use lotteries to enhance overall tax compliance, and, in turn, increase revenue collection.
Design: An online survey that delivered 2,774 valid responses from a wide range of respondents in South Africa finds that consumers would accept and engage with a tax lottery system and that they would shift their patronage to other businesses if one refused to issue them with the requested receipt.
Findings: Various demographic variables, including gender, monthly spend, and household size, can act as predictors of which types of consumers would be more likely to “buy into” or accept a tax lottery system. A positive perception of fairness (attitude) towards the tax lottery system also increases the likelihood of consumers accepting such a system.
Value: This study adds to the limited empirical studies that have explored tax lottery systems, especially from an African perspective. Revenue authorities can replicate the survey, and potentially use the current study’s results to determine whether implementing a tax lottery system would be viable. Predictors of supporters could also assist revenue authorities with targeted advertising of the system
The Power of a Brand: Paramount, Heartland Narrowcasting, and Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone
No full textTaylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone is, above all, the story of a brand. By situating the popular series in relation to both the streaming and culture wars, as well as a related schism in academic media studies, this article proposes that the political economy of media corporations and the narrative aesthetics of media texts must be understood in tandem. As the Paramount Network’s signature property, Yellowstone manifested the channel’s demographic mission to include women and “narrowcast” to heartland viewers. By sophisticated generic and narratological innovations, Yellowstone went further to create an aesthetic protocol of brand loyalty where the process of branding, at once ancient and modern, physical and symbolic, was made self-consciously central to the show’s redescription of rural cowboying as a cultural identity and marketable lifestyle. The show’s intertwining of branding and belonging, as well as its vigorous use of product placement and merchandising, modifies prior assumptions in the field of franchise studies. In the gap between brand synergy and brand dilution, Yellowstone presents itself as a paradigmatic case study for the new imbrications of narrative entertainment, commodity fetishism, and identitarian politics
Banville’s Anti-Ageing Narrative in The Sea and Ancient Light
No full textThe theme of ageing has drawn constant attention in literary studies since the 1990s. As a resistance to the traditional declining narrative for older adults, accomplished writers have developed various anti-ageing narratives in their works. In his most well-known novels, The Sea and Ancient Light, John Banville adopts effective narrative strategies to exhibit the vitality, insight, and wisdom of the elder males. The reminiscent first-person narrative leads the narrator to re-experience his youth, and the vivid recollection of the exciting details revives the elder protagonists’ passionate sensitivity. The leaping anachrony that juxtaposes present and past reveals the narrators’ complicated mental activities and brings about a more thorough understanding of life. The recurrent pauses break the flow of the time in the narration and indicate the narrators’ self-reflection and growing wisdom
Veelkantige perspektief op die werk van ’n formidabele digter
No full textIna Rousseau: Digter van die kwiksilwerwoord, deur Daniel Hugo (redakteur)
SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns/Naledi. pp. 337.
ISBN: 978-1-991256-44-7
Geresenseer deur Neil Cochrane
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7630-0585
Universiteit van Suid-Afrika, Suid-Afrika
[email protected]
Veelkantige perspektief op die werk van ’n formidabele digte
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath, edited by Anita Helle, Amanda Golden, and Maeve O’Brien
No full text“We Have Been Saying This for Thirty Years!”: Exploring Discursive Technologies of Disappearing African Feminist Knowledges
No full textOne of the most difficult challenges facing African feminist knowledge production on gendered and sexual violence is its persistent erasure. Despite decades of rich, complex, multimodal and wide-ranging discourse on the meanings of gendered and sexual violence in contexts embedded in colonial legacies of racist and class-based systems, ideas as ordinary to African feminist activism as “rape is not sex; rape is violence” (a mantra of early Rape Crisis teaching in the late 1970s) get systematically “disappeared” by what Gqola calls “rape as a language”. In this article, I explore some of the agnotological technologies at work in disappearing key understandings of gendered and sexual violence, understandings developed through feminist activisms and research. The South African context informs the thinking, which entails rigorous concern with theorisations of gendered and sexual violence rooted in historical and contemporary discussions of race and racialisation. A key difference between Northern-oriented and Southern grapples with questions of gendered and sexual violence lies in Southern integrity regarding the death grip of colonialities and the concomitant epistemological imperative of revolution against these. In the article, I work with a group of participants based in the highly public and effective Western Cape Network on Violence Against Women together with a particular instance of gendered violence against women (Enhle Mbali’s accusation of domestic violence against Black Coffee, in 2021) where it is possible to watch the recirculation of ideas long debunked by African feminist activism. I argue for an approach to knowledge creation alert to the politics of “disappearance"
The Plight of Employment Policies that Exclude Customary Practices in the Workplace
No full textSouth Africa is called a “rainbow nation”, and with its 11 official languages, the country is a melting pot of diverse cultures, traditions, and beliefs. This diversity is not without challenges. This brings interesting and complex questions from an employment perspective; therefore, striking a balance between the employer’s rights versus the employee’s traditional practices has become a significant challenge. The article analyses these challenges that arise as a result of the failure of section 8(3) of the Constitution to give a direct mandate to develop customary law to put into effect or limit a right that is found in the Bill of Rights and in this instance the right to fair labour practices in terms of section 23. The article will also analyse the cases dealing with employees who wanted to enforce their rights conferred to them by the Constitution to practice their culture but were excluded and discriminated against on some of the grounds listed in section 9(3) of the Constitution. The article will conclude by recommending that labour laws and the Constitution should be reviewed to cater for native persons, in particular, the recognition of customary laws and practices at the workplace
“Straight-acting to the Front”: Investigating the Influence of a Sexually Normative Double-bind on Gay and Lesbian Students at a South African University Campus
No full textHeteronormativity posits heterosexuality as the only acceptable and normal presentation of gendered and sexual identities. Similarly, homonormativity structures social life along heteronormative beliefs and ideals to construct conventional gay and lesbian identities. This article comments on a critical sociological exploration of the influences of these sexual normativities on the identity construction of gay and lesbian students at one campus of a South African university. Discourse was explored through a qualitative research paradigm focused on the lived experiences and reported narratives of gay and lesbian students. Three findings emerged from the data: first, how the participants socially constructed and performed their “ideal” gay and lesbian identities according to interrelated and mutually reinforcing hetero- and homonormative principles; second, these idealised typologies informed the social placement of gay and lesbian students on campus; finally, said ideals resulted in a so-called sexually normative double-bind that required gay and lesbian students to continuously navigate their membership of in- and/or out-groups on campus
Use and Acceptance of Open Educational Resources in Library and Information Science Departments in South African Higher Education Institutions
No full textTechnology advancement has caused various changes in education, a phenomenon which demands academics to keep up with these changes. Covid-19 caused multiple educational challenges, as online teaching had to be adopted and implemented quickly. The scarcity of online teaching and learning resources has been one of the major problems in South African education. The establishment of open educational resources (OERs) came with some solutions during the trying times of the pandemic, where direct contact with other people was significantly reduced. OERs are educational materials in the public domain introduced with an open licence, such as digital textbooks, research papers, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audios, videos, and animations. It emerged in this study that library and information science (LIS) departments have some awareness of OER. LIS staff employ OERs in their work. However, LIS students rarely utilise them in their studies. It was discovered that LIS departments experience challenges regarding the awareness of copyright, technological problems, quality assurance, and a lack of understanding OER. It can be concluded, based on the findings, that LIS departments were not fully prepared for the changes (moving to online learning) implemented in response to the pandemic. Thus, the study recommends that there should be improved OER awareness, academic staff training, workshops, adequate ICT infrastructure, and improvement of technical skills to increase the utilisation of these resources in LIS departments. This paper depicts an overview of OER and the involvement and opportunity it holds for library and LIS professionals