An online Master of Commerce by Research Thesis focusing on Integrative Thinking
Business leaders operate in an environment of competing interests, complex problems, and hard
choices. In the Rhodes Business School, we have as a research focus the identification and
exploration of these paradoxical problems and the application of integrative thinking to either
resolve them or analyse how they have been addressed.

A paradox exists when there is tension or an apparent contradiction between two or more beneficial
options, because they have contradictory but interrelated elements. Integrative thinking involves
combining the best of both options creatively, rather than choosing one alternative over the other.
This degree aims to provide business leaders with new perspectives to recognise, think about,
research, and address this type of problem.

Research Themes

Research topics are grouped into the following themes:

Sustainability and the fifth industrial revolution: Investigating the role of organisations in addressing the paradoxes arising from competing goals and methods of addressing sustainability. This includes challenges of the fourth industrial revolution that the fifth industrial revolution attempts to address.

Leadership & Governance: Investigating the role of the top management team and/or management board in attempting to address paradoxes arising from competing interests. The 4E model of the Rhodes Business School highlights some of these paradoxes.

Social Entrepreneurship: Investigating the role of entrepreneurs in addressing social issues in an economically sustainable way. There are tensions, dilemmas and complexities that social entrepreneurs have to balance as they create and achieve social value, and as they meet or mitigate social, environmental and economic needs.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems and commercialisation in higher education: There is a dominant discourse of academic research and an emerging discourse of commercialisation of academic work, which (re)produces a tensioned and conflictual sense of commercialisation and academic entrepreneurship (AE). These occur during the exploiting of scientific academic outputs purely for  business/commercial output within a public social good institution (HEI). These tensions include  conflicting identity struggles, the tensioned and conflictual field of commercialisation, and the dilemma of publish or patent.

Data science and decision making: This topic involves investigating approaches to decision-making processes for complex problems, assessing several options and making an optimal choice. Preference decisions are made by evaluating alternatives based on many features that sometimes clash. Decisions can be made with the help of data analytics or technology-enabled decision-making approaches using business environment data, retail data, customer data, or operational data, amongst others.

Digitalisation and technology: Investigating the capabilities and impact pathways of fourth and/or fifth industrial revolution technologies in operations (goods and services industries). The introduction of technology is to enhance processes, customer experience and satisfaction, continuous improvement, manage operational uncertainty and risk, or could be for monitoring and evaluation. However, in the process, dilemmas often arise.

Last Modified: Fri, 01 Nov 2024 09:00:15 SAST