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A communication task team appointed by the Government of South Africa in 1996suggested that there should be one corporate identity for the government. A problemresulting from this suggestion was what this unitary corporate identity should reflectand which elements it should include.This article is based on a study into the viability of creating one corporate identity forall the South African government departments.Background is given for a government decision to create one corporate identity. Theview that corporate identity consists of the integration between visual identity andbehavioural identity and its possible application on the government departments ofSouth Africa is discussed.The main finding of this study is that the current corporate identity of four selectedgovernment departments consists of corporate service and behaviour, dynamism andvisual identity

Purpose: The dissatisfaction with executive remuneration worldwide has increased because it is generally believed to have been instrumental to the 2008 Global Economic crisis. Central to this is the apparent unsatisfactory relationship between business performance and chief executive officer (CEO) remuneration. The primary aim of this study was to compare the pay-for-performance association between CEOs’ remuneration and state-owned entity performance before, during and after the economic crisis. It did so by assessing the chief executive remuneration link with state-owned enterprise performance from the period 2006 to 2014. Design/methodology/approach: Twenty-one schedule 2 state-owned enterprises in South Africa. This quantitative, longitudinal study, obtained secondary data from the annual reports of state-owned enterprises from the period 2006 to 2014. Ordinary least square multiple regression analysis was used as the principal statistical method. Findings/results: The findings indicate that the link between chief executive remuneration and state-owned entity performance demonstrated different patterns in the pre- and post-crisis periods. Practical implications: State-owned entity remuneration committees should place more emphasis on the financial efficiency measurements to enhance efficiencies in South African state-owned enterprises. Shareholders and regulators should take cognisance of measures to be used to assess the potential performance of state-owned entities, through executive remuneration, especially during an economic crisis. Findings could furthermore be of importance to other academics investigating this phenomenon. Originality/value: This research provides additional knowledge to the limited research available on SOEs in South Africa. Further, it reveals that an economic downturn affects the link between CEOs’ remuneration and SOE performance. This addresses a knowledge gap concerning the pay-for-performance link in South African SOEs and in emerging economies in general.

Tailings storage facilities (TSFs) are some of the most challenging structures to operate in the mining industry. Some of these structures are susceptible to liquefaction and piping failure, and need to be monitored carefully. In this study, ambient seismic noise interferometry is applied to image the internal structure of a tailings storage facility (TSF) that showed signs of increased seepage. Twenty geophones were deployed along a roughly 100 m section of the TSF and recorded continuous seismic data. The ambient noise was used to create Love wave dispersion curves between sensor pairs, which were in turn inverted to estimate the shear wave velocity of the dam wall as a function of depth. The velocity profile indicated the phreatic surface roughly 10 m below the surface, with regions near the centre of the array showing the phreatic surface as close as 3 m below the surface. These areas are spatially well correlated with the area where increased seepage was identified and the results were comparable with cone penetration tests that were performed in the area. The study showed that the analysis of ambient seismic noise can be a cost-effective, fast and non-invasive method to image the internal structure of TSFs.

An interferometric fiber sensor was developed and used to detect polarization changes resulting from varying the amplitude and frequency of an acoustic signal. The sensor was designed to be suited to geological activities such as seismic tomography, detection of sink holes, and early warning earthquake detection. The fiber sensor and a commercial geophone were subjected to the same tests to compare their characteristic response to different vibrations. The average signal sensitivities were 9.15 a.u./mJ and 8.37 a.u./mJ for the fiber sensor and geophone, respectively. The ability of each sensor to distinguish between short, successive events showed that the fiber sensor has superior sensitivity and resolution. This is attributed to the short recovery time of the optical fiber sensor. The geophone is limited in this regard by its inherent Faraday magnet and coil damping mechanism. The bandwidth of the optical fiber sensor is shown to be 3.349 kHz, more than 20 times that of the commercial geophone.

This study developed a preliminary career-enabler framework for use in a higher education setting. A quantitative survey was conducted with a sample of 1392 employees within a higher education institution in South Africa. Structural analysis was performed using exploratory factor analysis. The analysis yielded three enablers with acceptable psychometric properties, namely: self-transcendence, self-enhancement and self-conservation through work motives and needs. Interventions that focus on career-enablers within a higher education institution need to address these three factors.

In this book chief executive officer (CEO) remuneration pay packages (during 2012) of 50 major South African listed companies are analysed. Included in the study are four state-owned entities (SOEs) as well as a semi-privatised SOE. This book is a follow-up to a study by Crotty and Bonorchis (2006) in which they anticipated that without government intervention, executive remuneration packages would continue to increase. Disappointingly, these forecasts have come true, despite employment equity measures and changes to corporate governance requirements in the King III Code of Governance Principles (2009).

Grice distinguished between generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. The latter he described as ‘cases in which an implicature is carried by saying that p on a particular occasion in virtue of special features of the context’. The former he characterized as cases in which the ‘use of a certain form of words … would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature’ (Grice, 1989, p. 37). Grice did not develop the notion of a generalized conversational implicature (GCI) to any great extent. When he introduces the terminology in his paper ‘Logic and conversation’ he gives a few examples of the following sort:1 (1) A man came to my office yesterday afternoon. (2) Max found a turtle in a garden. (3) Robert broke a finger last night. In the case of (1) the hearer would be surprised to discover that the man was the speaker’s husband, for the use of the indefinite noun phrase ‘a man’ implicates that the speaker is not intimately related to the man. Similarly, in (2) we assume that neither the turtle nor the garden was Max’s own, for if they were, the speaker would surely have used the expressions ‘his turtle’ and ‘his garden’. On the other hand, the use of an indefinite noun phrase does not always implicate the lack of an intimate relation between the subject and the thing indicated by the noun phrase. In the case of (3) there is an implicature that it was Robert‖s own finger that Robert broke.2

Blood was obtained at an abattoir from 4 groups of cattle. The first group was slaughtered in a conventional way, the second and third were subjected to shechita slaughter with or without the application of the captive bolt immediately after the cutting of the throat, and the fourth group of cattle was subjected to a period of recumbency prior to conventional slaughter. Blood samples were analysed for concentrations of catecholamines, cortisol, glucose, lactate and total lipids. The haematocrit and osmolarity was also determined. There were no major differences in the blood variables of cattle subjected to conventional slaughter and those of cattle which had been subjected to a period of recumbency prior to conventional slaughter. Plasma catecholamine concentrations in cattle subjected to shechita slaughter without the application of a stun, were significantly elevated when compared to any of the other groups. It was concluded that postural changes have very little effect on the blood variables, but that the application of a stun after the throat has been cut in shechita slaughter abolishes the increases in blood variables associated with shechita in the absence of stunning.