1,720,961 research outputs found
Developing entrepreneurship through microfranchising: evidence from South African practices
Get PDFPhD (Business Management)Department of Business ManagementMicrofranchising’ is one of the new innovative entrepreneurial concepts that has gained traction in the past few years and potentially can provide a livelihood to the three billion people that live at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoPInnovationCenter, 2020) on less than US$2 a day. While microfranchising is a strategy meant to rapidly scale-up entrepreneurship behaviour, very little is known about the microfranchising processes as well as its ability to enhance entrepreneurship in South Africa. Resultantly, the latter is ignored from entrepreneurship discussion and discourse at both academic and policy levels. To address this gap the study assessed microfranchising practices in South Africa, with the aim of proposing a microfranchising framework that will enhance entrepreneurship development. The study used the interpretivism research paradigm to achieve the study objectives. Primary and secondary data were employed to collect data on the microfranchising practices in South Africa. The study sampled five microfranchise entrepreneurs (four microfranchisee and one microfranchisor using the in-depth structured interview format while secondary data (microfranchisees and microfranchisors success stories) and was employed to collect data on the former and current practices of microfranchising in South Africa. The collected data was analysed using the ATLAS.ti. The study results show that microfranchisees exhibit traits of successful entrepreneurs. As a result, the study concludes that microfranchising can be used as a tool for entrepreneurship development using the proposed microfranchising framework developed in Chapter 6 of this study. The value of this work is among the first in seeking to propose a framework for developing entrepreneurship through microfranchising. The implication of the study is that it potentially provides policymakers with valuable tools to understand microfranchising practices and its efficacy in stimulating entrepreneurship development in South Africa. The study recorded and established microfranchising practices in South Africa to enhance the extinct academic literature on microfranchising and entrepreneurship ventures operating at the BoP.NR
Franchising in a volatile business environment: a case of the fast food industry in Harare, Zimbabwe
No full textMComDepartment of Business ManagementSee the attached abstract belo
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
A bibliometric analysis of the development of business incubation literature in South Africa
Get PDFThe study analyzes the development of business incubation literature in South Africa. The VOSviewer software was used to perform the bibliometric analysis of 44 articles on business incubation in South Africa conducted between 1996 and 2023 that were obtained from the Scopus database. The study has also revealed literature on business incubation started to appear in 1996 in South Africa. The study’s keyword co-occurrence analysis also revealed that the following words had the most occurrences and were clustered into the following: entrepreneurship and business incubation, business incubators and effectiveness, entrepreneurial education and informal Business, SMEs and start-up, business and sustainability, and business development and competitiveness. The study sorts the articles based on the following indicators: number of documents published in a year, eminent authors and keyword co-occurrence, which identified six categories of the most prominent research themes being covered by articles reviewed. The study only used articles that were written in English language only. Therefore, future research should consider articles written in other languages and expand the study to other regions, continents, and even global scale
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
AN INSIGHT OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MICRO-FRANCHISE BUSINESSES OPERATING IN SOUTH AFRICA
Get PDFMicrofranchising is one of the new innovative business concepts that has gained traction in the past few years, and which could provide a solution to the challenges faced by micro- entrepreneurs and stimulate the growth of entrepreneurship. Microfranchising has therefore, emerged as a potential strategy meant to rapidly scale-up entrepreneurship behaviour within the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). However, despite microfranchising being singled out as a panacea for economic growth globally, very little is known about the microfranchising business concept in South Africa. Resultantly, the latter is ignored from entrepreneurship discussion and discourse at both academic and policy levels. To address this gap, the study assessed microfranchising practices in South Africa, to profile the characteristics of microfranchise businesses in South Africa. The study used the interpretivism research paradigm to achieve the study objectives. Primary and secondary data were employed to collect data on the microfranchising practices in South Africa. Five in-depth interviews were successfully conducted with microfranchisees, while secondary data (microfranchisees’ and microfranchisors’ success stories) was employed to collect data on the former and current practices of microfranchising in South Africa. The collected data was analysed using the ATLAS.ti. The study results show that the microfranchise business exhibits traits of BoP markets, centralised inventory buying, comprehensive training of microfranchisees, decentralised inventory buying, job creation, master microfranchisee, sales orientation, self-reliance of the business, standardisation and adaptation. 
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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