...У входа в науку, как у входа в ад, должно быть выставлено требование: Здесь нужно, чтоб душа была тверда; здесь страх не должен подавать совета.
Маркс К.
Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, , course: PhD Commerce, language: English, abstract: This research was carried out with the objective of establishing the challenges faced by small and medium scale entrepreneurs in their efforts to adopt strategic management in their value chains. A review of relevant literature revealed that strategic management is a very important approach that all businesses need, no matter their size, in order to enhance effectiveness. It is known to support professionalism, profitability and sustainable value addition when applied according to best practice.Quantitative and qualitative approaches to data gathering were applied to enable the researcher to establish a richer picture of the exact situation on the ground. Quantitative data were collected from a sample of 292 respondents while qualitative data were obtained from a sample of 127 key informants and stakeholders. Drawing inspiration from the survival strategies of the chameleon, the researcher postulated the Chameleon Survival Strategy Model for small and medium-scale enterprises. The model was then used as a benchmark in the analysis of quantitative data, which were treated using the statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) and qualitative data, which were content analysed. The chameleon survival strategy was used as the standard to assess the extent to which small and medium scale enterprises were compliant wit...