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The purpose of this paper is to present a tentative typology of social enterprises in South Africa. It also tries to establish a base line on the current state of social entrepreneurship in South Africa. While the term seems to have been appearing more and more frequently in both the public and political domain in the past decade or so, the current knowledge of social enterprise in South Africa (as in Africa more broadly) remains very limited.

This paper tries to address this dearth of academic literature on social entrepreneurship in South Africa by reviewing the extant academic and grey literature as well as various policy documents with the aim of discerning the various legal forms under which social enterprises can incorporate.

The paper distinguishes three avenues for incorporation: as a non-profit entity, a for-profit entity or a hybrid structure.

It calls for both rigorous and systematic empirical and theoretical work that is grounded in the realities of the country to strengthen sound policy decision-making as well as effective organisation and management of these organisations, which can play a crucial role in both economic and social development of South Africa.

As part of the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) project, this paper contributes to the understanding of the geographically distinct manifestations of social enterprise in South Africa. At the same time, it aims to present a research agenda to move social entrepreneurship in South Africa forward.

How do you steer an organization that is not able to steer itself? How do you influence an organization's ability for self-organization? How do you empower a nonprofit organization (NPO) in South Africa in order to help them to organize themselves in ways that make it possible for donors in the West to collaborate with them in different international aid projects? And how do NPOs react in response to the West's attempts to empower them? These are the questions that Frederik Claeyé addresses in his chapter about how Western donors shape the governance structures and management practices of South African NPOs. To begin, Claeyé shows how the Western ideological discourse of managerialism that emphasizes accountability, organizational definition, and capacity building is enacted as a means to achieve the political aims of effective funding. He then shows how a sample of South African NPOs reacted to these external attempts to organize their own self-organization. Here, Claeyé isolates three ideal types of reactions: conformism, resistance, and hybridity. In conclusion, Claeyé critiques the global ideology of management discourse for being weighted in favor of Western techniques of management at the expense of the South African culture of Ubuntu, here understood as reciprocity and solidarity. The ideology of Western management practices has a limited understanding of, and limited room for, Ubuntu. The effect of this ideology, functioning as a “regime of truth” in the Foucauldian sense of the term, is hybridization, which Claeyé identifies as the individual translation by South African NPOs of the Western requirement for structure.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for the analysis of the power dynamics shaping the emergence of hybrid management systems in sub‐Sahara Africa. It aims to achieve this by showing how insights from postcolonial theory can further enrich cross‐cultural management theory.

The mainstream perspectives in current cross‐cultural management literature are reviewed as a basis for the development of a theoretical framework that emphasises cross‐cultural interaction and a consideration of the power dynamics surrounding non‐profit organisations operating in a sub‐Saharan African context is integrated. Drawing on the metaphors of mimicry and hybridity, this paper argues that postcolonial theory offers an avenue for theorising cross‐cultural interaction and the power dynamics surrounding these cross‐cultural encounters. Examples chosen from the author's ongoing work in the NGO sector in the Eastern Cape, South Africa serve as illustrations of how the analytical framework might generate insights into the workings of power dynamics shaping the emergence of hybrid ways of managing and organising.

It is argued that through a focus on interaction and the surrounding power relations, this framework allows for a more contextualised understanding of the emergence of hybrid management systems in non‐profit organisations.

The paper shows that, f cross‐cultural management theory hopes to inform the practice of non‐profit management in sub‐Sahara Africa, it is imperative the power dynamics at work are clearly understood.

Purpose – This chapter contributes to the growing debate on the diffusion of managerialist modes of thinking across third-sector organisations. It offers an analysis into the power dynamics at play in the emergence of hybrid management systems (HMSs) by looking at the management practices in non-profit organisations (NPOs) active in combating HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

Design/methodology/approach – In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with donor organisations and big non-governmental organisations (NGOs) based in the Northern hemisphere, and with managers and team leaders in South African NGOs. Taking a postcolonial perspective, the HMSs resulting from the encounter at the ‘glocal’ interface are investigated.

Findings – The data indicate that the power dynamics shaping the process of hybridisation work through three intertwined circuits of power: the managerialist discourse, the ‘rules of practice’ emanating from that discourse and episodic power relations at the level of interactions.

Research limitations/implications – As is the case with most qualitative research, care must be taken in generalising the findings of this research beyond the organisations participating in this study. At a theoretical level, the implications of this chapter are its contributions to three sets of literature that rarely interact: NPO management, international and cross-cultural management (ICCM) and critical management studies (CMS). At the level of organisational praxis, the findings have potential impact in terms of developing innovative ways of managing NPOs.

Originality/value – The originality and value of this chapter lies in its application of postcolonial theory to understanding hybridisation processes shaping management ideas and practices in South African NPOs.

The accountability of third-sector organisations is a contentious issue for donors, NGO managers and academics. While in the corporate sector accountability has traditionally been limited to maximising shareholder profits (Friedman, 2007), critical perspectives on accounting have extended to non-financial information for a much wider group of stakeholders (Mook, 2010). The main driver for broadening our understanding of who is a stakeholder and what type of engagement matters is an emancipatory agenda, which reclaims the democratic ideals of voice representation and influence (O’Dwyer, 2005), and in so doing provides an opportunity to marry social accounting (SA) with critical management studies (CMS). Gibbon and Angier work at this under-studied intersection to build grounded theory on the dynamic processes by which accountability takes place in third-sector organisations (Mook, 2010).

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a broad‐based study that initially investigated a possible gap in global inputs into the fight against HIV/AIDS and TB co‐infection, and outputs in terms of results achieved. It is proposed that such a gap may be hypothesized to be due, at least in part, to inappropriate management regimes within the global health governance structure. The research does not simply question the effectiveness of the management of programs and projects, but rather the inappropriateness resulting from the lack of addressing cross‐cultural issues.

The factors facilitating or hampering project service delivery were examined, by looking at 12 case studies in Botswana and South Africa. These data were complemented with seven semi‐structured interviews with donor organizations and NGOs, conducted in the North. Cultural interactions were investigated by using the concept of “interfaces”.

The results suggest that there is a disjuncture between the global and local level that affects project delivery. The main issues hampering project outcomes can be summarized as systemic, structural and cultural.

The article's main contributions are both theoretical, looking at global project delivery from a cross‐cultural management perspective, as well as to development praxis by highlighting the need to focus more critically on cross‐cultural management issues within the global health governance structure, and indeed within international development as a whole.