White Managers and the African Renaissance – a ‘retail renaissance’ or a new colonial encounter at South African companies in foreign, African countries? Abstract: Codesria 11th General Assembly, Maputo, December 2005 Darlene Miller Senior Lecturer, Sociology Department, Rhodes University. Grahamstown. South Africa
[email protected] Multinational companies are dynamic agents of regional integration. Post- apartheid Southern Africa brought expectations of South Africa's capacity to generate economic and political benefits for the region and the continent. The moment of openness offered by the political change in South Africa allowed for a reconfiguration of regional power relations. One concrete instance where these regional power relations are reconfigured is in the workplaces of South African multinational companies in foreign, African countries. Drawing on a case study of Shoprite, a South African retail multinational, in Mozambique and Zambia, this paper shows how South African companies create managerial hierarchies in host countries that both restructure and reinforce South Africa's regional domination. While NEPAD and the African Renaissance claim a moment of regional regeneration, the organisational structures and representational strategies of the regional South African firm refashion a colonial encounter. Forms of workplace organisation, while not the only factors that affect regional perceptions of workers, have important consequences for the regional dispositions and claims of workers employed by these firms. The case study below shows that Shoprite, a South African regional multinational, is led primarily by white South Africans. The political significance of this enduring racial pattern is not lost on local hosts. A discourse of modernisation informs the dispositions of these white South African managers 'in the field'.