“It is 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell – an event which changed the world by proving communism to be a failure. However, since that time we have also witnessed the worst that liberal capitalism has to offer – in light of the recent recession, is it not now the time to look at business and politics from a different paradigm?”

This was the question posed by Director of the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB), Professor Walter Baets, as he opened the UCT GSB Centre for Emergent Market Business Conference this week.

“Recent economic turmoil demands that we investigate a different approach if business is to be successful and sustainable for all. This is where business schools have a critical role to play, in both research and teaching – we are called on to better integrate a more holistic and systemic way of viewing the world into our methodologies.”

Baets said that operating within an emergent market paradigm offers the ideal context for exploring how sustainability can become a business reality.

“Emergent market economies are classified as having high degrees of uncertainty, high degrees of complexity, and social inequality,” he explained. “By understanding these conditions and how to address them, we hope to contribute as a business school to relevant and sustainable approaches in the public and private sectors.”

The UCT GSB Centre for Emergent Market Business Conference explored four main areas of research and practice in emergent markets, namely: Governance; Diversity, Culture and Dynamics; Entrepreneurial Development and Sustainable Business; and Development, Innovation and Technology.

It brought together leading thinkers from within the School’s academic community, representatives from international business schools, and senior executives from business.

According to Professor Steven Michael Burgess, Professor of Business Administration in Marketing at the GSB, emergent market countries typically have dual population segments: an “elite” segment with values, living standards and lifestyles comparable to high-income countries and a larger “mass-market” segment that lives in more impoverished and socially-constrained circumstances. This has major implications for sustainable business practice.

“South Africa is similar to other emergent consumer markets. The SA Tribes research project identifies approximately 29% of South Africans as “elite” consumers, while the lowest earning and most vulnerable mass-market group make up the majority at 71%.

“Business traditionally has focused on the elite segment. As we see worldwide, the path to socially and economically sustainable business models increasingly requires organisations to engage with the mass-market and respond to their values, needs and concerns with new and more appropriate business models,” said Burgess.

“This requires us to think in new ways. We find the same dimensions of culture in South Africa as elsewhere, however, “ubuntu” and “ancestral relevance” are important South African cultural dimensions of identity – these are not accounted for by existing Western models".

"In research or business practice, it is thus critical to take new steps to get deeper insight into people and societal complexities, shed assumptions that no longer apply in the changing context and develop new models of business practice that are more relevant to the local context.”

Keynote speaker for the Conference, Professor Michael Bond who is the Chair Professor of Psychology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and widely regarded as one of the most eminent thinkers within the field of psychology today, added that from his research, Western models also do not neatly apply to the populations of emergent Eastern countries – like China – where a value such as “relationship harmony” is more prominent than the “self esteem” value present in much of Europe and the US.

The UCT GSB Centre for Emergent Market Business (CEMB) – the first of its kind in Africa – was launched to build a deeper understanding of operating within the emergent market paradigm, and to facilitate business opportunities and skills development in the region.