A powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994.

This book explores a century of business development of The South African Life Assurance Company, from a specific local focus to a national conglomerate expanding into global insurance markets. Established as a strategic vehicle to address Afrikaner economic marginalization and abject poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sanlam has displayed both path dependence and a dynamic adaptability to complex changing contexts to become a global player. The strategic convergence of economic empowerment through the mobilization of savings into insurance products, as well as Afrikaner nationalism, assisted this growth. Sanlam has played an a-typical role in the economic empowerment of an ethnic entity through extensive investments into the industrializing South African economy. This strategic diversion created operational limitations that were only resolved early in the twenty-first century. As globalization, financial deregulation, and weakened Afrikaner political and social hegemony manifested, strategic change management relied on the path dependence of empowerment strategies to address new markets with similar needs to those of the early stakeholder market of 1918. The former mutual life office demutualized operations to become a diversified financial services group of companies operating across almost the entire African continent, as well as in India, Malaysia, and the UK. This volume presents a business history of strategic management of an insurance enterprise, and its transformation from a defined cultural context into an international empowerment strategy through innovation on all levels of business operation and organization. This book is an Open Access publication, available online under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

'Tales from the Marketplace: Stories of Revolution, Reinvention and Renewal' is a highly innovative approach to building an understanding of the realities of market-led strategic change in companies. It provides an engaging, honest, and effective understanding of real market strategy in major organizations by focussing on the forces behind value-driven strategy. Nigel Piercy provides new and incisive insights into strategy and marketing through business "stories" that are contemporary and provocative. These new "stories" depict how major organizations have experienced revolution in their traditional markets - created by new types of competitors with new business models. The search for superior value is overtaking traditional brand and relationship strategies. The challenge to companies is reinvention and renewal and the alternative is obsolescence and decline. After all, did the major banks really expect to be competing with supermarkets, car companies, Virgin and internet-based companies to provide retail bank services? The book is based on the author's view that: · Business is exciting, turbulent and unpredictable - the "stories" we read and study should be too! · From Dell Computers and easyJet to Amazon.com and Skoda Cars, it is the most innovative companies that have most to teach us about reinvention and new business models · The inflexible analytical frameworks of the past no longer apply - "stories" of reinvention and renewal show the creative strategies developed by companies to cope with threats and exploit opportunities around them. 'Tales from the Marketplace' is essential, timely and designed to be highly readable for managers. It also provides an innovative approach for undergraduate and MBA level teachers and students, and for participants on executive programmes in marketing and strategic management.

In its last decades, the apartheid regime was confronted with an existential threat. While internal resistance to the last whites-only government grew, mandatory international sanctions prohibited sales of strategic goods and arms to South Africa. To counter this, a global covert network of nearly fifty countries was built. In complete secrecy, allies in corporations, banks, governments and intelligence agencies across the world helped illegally supply guns and move cash in one of history's biggest money laundering schemes. Whistleblowers were assassinated and ordinary people suffered. Weaving together archival material, interviews and newly declassified documents, Apartheid Guns and Money exposes some of the darkest secrets of apartheid's economic crimes, their murderous consequences, and those who profited: heads of state, arms dealers, aristocrats, bankers, spies, journalists and secret lobbyists. These revelations, and the difficult questions they pose, will both allow and force the new South Africa to confront its past.

This first comprehensive examination of U.S. relations with Namibia offers a critical analysis of the economic and historical determinants of current U.S. policy in southern Africa. Dr. Cooper first traces American ties to Namibia dating from the 1700s, documenting an extensive commercial interest in the area prior to German colonization. Subsequen