Universities all over the world are realigning themselves with service quality and customer orientated practices. To increase student intake universities are now using their excellence in service quality as a competitive advantage to increase their share of local and international student segments. To improve service quality within a university and create a competitive advantage universities have to be more market driven. Universities have to tailor their service offerings to cater to student needs. Understanding student needs is not easy. Understanding specifically student perceptions of a university's' service quality is also very complex. The complexity lies in students having very different insights into how they view a service offering within a university. Therefore, the importance of quality surveys being conducted on students is very crucial. These surveys can shed more light on what makes students dissatisfied with a university's service offerings. Secondly, these surveys can indicate student service quality gaps in tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance or empathy in student encounters with the service delivery process. This study was conducted at a top-ranking South African university and investigated students' perceptions of service quality. The results of the empirical survey indicated that students were dissatisfied with the university's' service offerings. In this paper the researcher comments on quality gaps that students identified in the service delivery process. Recommendations to close these quality gaps and improve service quality within the university are also outlined and highlighted.
This paper finds that the decline in the numbers of Basotho1 migrant mine workers since the 1990s was not market induced but rather a result of political and policy changes in South Africa. As a result of these changes, household income throughout rural Lesotho dropped significantly. As current migrant households generally do not have skilled workers or operate family businesses, the paper makes a case for training in skills and entrepreneurship as a means of utilizing Lesotho’s comparative advantages to generate domestic employment and absorb retrenched and prospective migrant mine workers.
Many SMEs lack business competitiveness and sustainability. Their potential for growth and expansion is limited, and they are constrained by institutional challenges (such as high-interest rates and rigid regulatory requirements) which impede their creativity, innovativeness and sustainability. Despite the numerous contributions of the sector to the Ghanaian economy, SME internationalisation in Ghana is at the nascent stage and is bedevilled with a gamut of institutional challenges. Studies of the formal and informal institutional effects on indigenous SME internationalisation in the Ghanaian economy are limited. Furthermore, a stylised framework which serves as a model to aid academics and researchers in investigating the impact of the formal institutions (legal and political) and informal institutions (socio-culture) on Ghanaian-owned businesses is under-canvassed in the Ghanaian entrepreneurial eco-system. Hence, this paper suggests a model for institutions and SME internationalisation to boost their innovativeness and business sustainability.
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