AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

A stakeholder analysis of the Marikina mining incident : implications for HR management

by Jennifer Esme-Louise Engelbrecht




Institution: University of Johannesburg
Department:
Year: 2015
Record ID: 1469616
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/13772


Abstract

In August 2012 the South African mining industry was the focus of attention due to an illegal strike at Lonmin Platinum mine that resulted in the police shooting striking employees on 16 August 2012. Thirty-four employees lost their lives on that day. An additional ten people died in violent protests in the build-up to the main shooting incident. This strike period has become widely known as ‘Marikana’. This historical incident illustrates how a single incident within an organisation can have an impact at various levels and affect multiple stakeholders. The main objective of this study was to identify the effect that the Marikana mining incident had on Lonmin (the organisation) and its main stakeholders as well as to identify the effect the stakeholders and Lonmin had on each other. In order to reach these objectives an historical timeline of the sequence of events surrounding the Marikana incident was constructed. The main stakeholders involved in the Marikana incident were then identified, and the relationships and the relative strengths between these stakeholders were mapped. The methodology used in the study was Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) as applied by Franzosi (2010). In particular, the content from English newspaper articles sourced from South Africa and England relating to the Marikana mining incident for the period 1 to 24 August 2012 were reviewed, coded and analysed. All relevant data from the articles were recorded in a manual database, coded according to the semantic triplet of ‘actors’, ‘actions’ and ‘subjects’ (S-V-O) (Franzosi, 1989) and analysed based on QNA principles (Franzosi, 2010). First, a sequence analysis was conducted, identifying the roles (consequences) that the respective actors (stakeholders and subgroupings of stakeholders) enacted as well as the order in which they unfolded. The analysis was used to produce a series of network graphs to visually depict the sequence of events and the respective effects of the sequencing of these events. These graphs take the form of stake maps and visually tell the story of how events unfolded and the effects of these events on all the actors involved ...