Investigating Interdependent and Conflicting Objectives in South African SMME Policies: Competitiveness vs. Employment Creation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Local and international research on small enterprises speaks to the importance of Small, \nMedium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) in contributing to their respective economies and \nthe potential of these enterprises to generate employment. The National Small-Business \nStrategy, as proposed in the 1995 White Paper on Small Business, was developed to assist the \nprocesses of employment creation and economic growth through assisting SMMEs in \nbecoming more competitive in the global marketplace. Debate as to the effectiveness of this \nstrategy and the subsequent development programmes has given rise to claims of conflict \nbetween the goals of economic growth and employment creation potential of SMMEs. The \npurpose of this research is therefore to determine links between employment creation \npotential and growth potential through increased competitiveness of ten South African \nSMMEs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with owner-managers of each of the \nSMMEs. The interviews focussed on issues of competition in the respective markets, \ncompetitive practices, labour issues, technology issues and perspectives on the South African \nbusiness environment. Additional interviews were conducted with a human development \nconsultant and a politician at municipal level with experience in small enterprise \ndevelopment. The additional interviews covered the same broad topics as the SMME \ninterviews but from perspectives removed from those of the owner-managers. Thematic \nContent Analysis (TCA) was used to extract themes emerging from the interviews from \nwhich links between competitiveness of the SMMEs and employment creation potential \ncould be drawn. Results show that SMMEs aiming to become more competitive will tend to \nlimit their dependence on labour to minimise costs and productivity constraints. Therefore, \nthe policy objectives of economic growth and employment creation through SMMEs are \ndivergent. The research adds to the body of knowledge on South African SMMEs and points \nto the need for continued research, particularly in developing up to date statistics on the \nSMME economy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".