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Commerce Beyond the Numbers
The two greatest influences on the way UCT’s Commerce Faculty has gone
about its work in the past year are a quest for relevance, at both policy and
grassroots level, and an increasing spirit of collaboration within the sciences. In
addition, the faculty has continued to place emphasis on social innovation and
entrepreneurship, along with leadership and a values-driven ethic that has seen
it grow in both excellence and relevance, increase its research outputs, and seize
the unique opportunities of the day.
T
he Commerce Faculty has enjoyed the highest rate
of improvement in annual peer-reviewed, accredited
journal outputs at UCT over the past three years.
During a periodof significant budgetary pressure that forced
steady increases in the faculty’s ratio of undergraduate
students to staff, and postgraduate students in need of
supervision, two professors received the first A ratings
ever awarded by the National Research Foundation to
researchers in any commerce faculty in South Africa. The
number of staff with an NRF B rating, which indicates
considerable international recognition, doubled. These are
objective signals of improvement not easily achieved.
The basic essential condition for this success under
pressure is straightforward: the faculty’s academic corps
has an unusually low median age, so a high number of
the staff are still growing in their research capacities,
confidence and efficiency. Crucially, when confronted with
shrinking resources, especially in that most precious asset,
time, most staff have responded by working even harder
and longer than they had already been. The faculty has
supported and leveraged this superior collective work ethic
through organisational change.
Across the sciences, research has for many decades
become increasingly collaborative; this is due mainly to
greater specialisation which requires projects to involve
multiple authors. A second driver is the global tendency
to extend larger grants to fewer but more ambitious
projects, rather than making small grants to individuals.
This is leading international research universities to
organise around strong thematic research units guided
by the best principles of entrepreneurship and enterprise
management.
Organisation into research units is particularly important to
the Commerce Faculty for an idiosyncratic set of reasons.
As noted above, the faculty is comparatively young, and
young researchers thrive best given close mentorship
and leadership by established scholars who are better
positioned to attract funding. Relatedly, a key to improving
postgraduate recruitment and completion rates is providing
incoming doctoral and research master’s students with
strong support structures. Research students who work
not merely with a single supervisor, but as members of a
collaborative group engaged in multiple related projects
at any given time, are much more likely to graduate more
quickly, experience less stress and risk of alienation during
their thesis work, be exposed to a wider view of research
in their discipline, and be richly networked when they seek
employment after completing their studies.
The Commerce Faculty has long contained within itself
a model for this kind of organisation. Historically, the
strongest part of the faculty concerned with research is the
School of Economics (SoE) which has, for almost a decade,
been structured around four research units: the AIDS and
Society Research Unit (ASRU), DataFirst, the Development
Policy Research Unit (DPRU), and the Southern Africa
Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU).
SALDRU – the longest established and mightiest of the
units – has for 30 years highlighted poverty and inequality
as its focal issues and produced a substantial body of
groundbreaking work that has helped policymakers to
systematically address poverty alleviation in South Africa.
The unit is entrusted with the design and administration of
the National Income and Development Survey, funded by
the Office of the President. Since 2010, it has housed the