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Celebrating 25 years of the UFS Business School

29 November 2024 | Story Anthony Mthembu | Photo Tania Allan

Business School 25 Year Celebration — Some of the guests and staff members of the UFS Business School who attended the 25th anniversary celebration of the school.

To commemorate its 25^th anniversary, the Business School at the University of the Free State (UFS) held a celebratory event on the UFS Bloemfontein Campus on 22 November 2024.

Prof Frans Prinsloo, acting Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) at the UFS who attended the event, said, “The occasion is not just a celebration of the passing of time, but it’s also an opportunity for us to reflect on the values, achievements, and aspirations that have shaped the journey of the UFS Business School.” The event, which was regarded as a ‘momentous milestone’, was also attended by Prof Nicolene Barkhuizen, Director of the UFS Business School, Prof Frederick Fourie and Prof Bennie Anderson – founding members of the Business School, as well as Prof Tienie Crous and Prof Hendri Kroukamp, who are former deans of EMS.

A walk down memory lane

In his opening address, Prof Prinsloo reflected on the growth of the Business School over the past 25 years and highlighted some of the achievements of the staff that make up the Business School. However, the highlight of the event for many in the audience was the trip down memory lane by the founding members of the Business School as well as the former deans of the faculty.

In their address, Profs Fourie and Anderson shared some of their fondest memories and experiences as they worked towards putting together the Business School. For instance, Prof Fourie indicated that in order to ensure that the syllabus was of high quality, the founding members had to travel overseas and learn from several institutions, such as Harvard Business School.

In addition, Profs Fourie and Anderson spoke extensively about their pride in the Business Management and Leadership (BML) programme, offered by the Business School. According to Prof Fourie, the degree was the brainchild of Prof Anderson, who for several reasons wanted to consider working adults who might not have had experience in school learning. As such, they consider the BML programme as one of their most special achievements, given its impact. Furthermore, Prof Crous and Prof Kroukamp also shared their memories of being part of the institution, and specifically the Business School.

Forging ahead for another 25 years

In the pursuit of 25 more years, Prof Barkhuizen indicated that the school is aiming to achieve success with several projects. These include staff and student exchanges in order to optimise the experience of both stakeholders. “Even though we have a global reach, it is important for us to apply it locally,” she said. In addition, Prof Barkhuizen highlights that for the Business School to continue serving the needs of its unique student clientele, it needs to become more agile. As such, it will continuously reinvent its programmes with the input of its stakeholders. For instance, she indicated that the school is looking at implementing joint qualification offerings, among other things.

As the event ended, Prof Barkhuizen said that she was, “so proud of the progress made by the Business School; it has been a journey to get here, but this function today taught me to never give up hope and not to give up on one’s dreams”.

News Archive

Code-switching, tokenism and consumerism in print advertising

2014-10-27

Code-switching, linguistic tokenism and modern consumerism in contemporary South African print advertising. This is the current research focus of two lecturers from the Faculty of the Humanities at the UFS, Prof Angelique van Niekerk and Dr Thinus Conradie.

The act of switching between two or more languages is replete with socio-cultural meaning, and can be deployed to advance numerous communicative strategies, including attempts at signalling cultural familiarity and group affiliation (Chung 2006).

For advertising purposes, Fairclough’s (1989) seminal work on the ideological functions of language remark on the usefulness of code-switching as a means of fostering an advertiser-audience relationship that is conducive to persuasion. In advertising, code-switching is a valuable means with which a brand may be invested with a range of positive associations. In English-dominated media, these associations derive from pre-existing connotations that target audiences already hold for a particular (non-English) language. Where exclusivity and taste, for example, are associated with a particular European language (such as French), advertising may use this languages to invest the advertised brand with a sense of exclusivity and taste.

In addition, empirical experiments with sample audiences (in the field of consumer research) suggest that switching from English to the first language of the target audience, is liable to yield positive results in terms of purchase intentions (Bishop and Peterson 2011). This effect is enhanced under the influence of modern consumerism, in which consumption is linked to the performance of identity and ‘[b]rands are more than just products; they are statements of affiliation and belonging’ (Ngwenya 2011, 2; cf. Nuttall 2004; Jones 2013).

In South African print magazines, where the hegemony of English remains largely uncontested, incorporating components of indigenous languages and Afrikaans may similarly be exploited for commercial ends. Our analysis suggests that the most prevalent form of code-switching from English to indigenous South African languages represents what we have coded as linguistic tokenism. That is, in comparison with the more expansive use of both Afrikaans and foreign languages (such as French), code-switching is used in a more limited manner, and mainly to presuppose community and solidarity with first-language speakers of indigenous languages. In cases of English-to-Afrikaans code-switching, our findings echo the trends observed for languages such as French and German. That is, the language is exploited for pre-existing associations. However, in contrast with French (often associated with prestige) and German (often associated with technical precision), Afrikaans is used to invoke cultural stereotypes, notably a self-satirical celebration of Afrikaner backwardness and/or lack of refinement that is often interpolated with hyper-masculinity.

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