The higher education landscape in South Africa is dynamic and one of the most rapidly changing environments, which is undergoing fundamental metamorphosis. The higher education institutions (HEIs) are facing, among other challenges, the alterations in government funding and globalisation of higher education which bring with them new competitors. It is in this sense that this study focuses on the involvement of operational employees in decision-making processes. This study sets out to explore the employee perceptions of them being involved in decision-making with an emphasis on the cascading of responsibility and accountability for power, information, knowledge and rewards to lower levels within their institution. A quantitative study was conducted with 410 randomly selected employees within one University of Technology in South Africa.The overall perception of employees with regard to their involvement in decision making indicated that there is a lack of them being involved in decision making processes.
<p>Historically, township Small Retail Outlets were mostly established for survival and operated under a generally closed market system where the competition was not very strong. However, with the advent of democracy many people lost their formal income through retrenchments and out of desperation, many of these people opened Small Retail Outlets thus most of the existing and new entrants into the township market were unskilled or semiskilled labourers with little or no formal skills in business or entrepreneurship. Such efforts were rarely guided by any specific and informed strategy of identifying and exploiting a gap in the market. With the consolidation of the free market system under democracy, big brand businesses such as Shoprite Checkers and Small Retail Outlets of foreign nationals with different strategies entered and competed in this township market. With fewer formal skills in business and entrepreneurship, the owners of the Small Retail Outlets struggled to compete and thrive under these relatively new economic conditions. Given this situation, I conducted semi-structured interviews with fifteen of these traditional Small Retail Outlets to find out and better understand the challenges they face and the skills that might be needed to aggressively compete in this space. Based on these findings and understandings, I further examined these issues and suggest infusions of specific entrepreneurship skills that could develop their aggressive competitiveness.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> entrepreneurship, competitiveness, small retail outlets, shopping complexes, innovation</p>
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