Conveniencing the Family In Agri-Based Processing Enterprise

financial prudence, flexibility and speed in production whenever they had perishable raw material (milk) to process and produce products.

At first a memorandum was written about each SME to develop an understanding of the phenomenon in a particular context. It was only after the development of cultural assumptions in each SME that more composite memoranda were written to embrace the various contexts in the other SMEs. Composition of memoranda continued until the generation of theory. One of the composite and advanced memoranda pointed to a cultural assumption which was eventually developed as pragmatic business survival mind sets of strategic leaders in SMEs. Another memorandum focused on the concept of sense making, which was discovered as a key strategising activity, foundational to other strategising activities. Gradually, memoranda progressed in their depth of content to be more conceptual, and also depicted the variation within a phenomenon over time. The iterative procedure of data collection and analysis was eventually characterised as validation and correction until data settled in categories that meaningfully reflected cultural assumptions across the SMEs and patterns of strategising activities.

During the early stages of data analysis, the researcher was unearthing from the data, the values “stated” and also values “practised” by strategic leaders. The focus was on how these were manifested in the underlying cultural assumptions that informed what strategic leaders were consistently doing, or were regarding as valid solutions to problems in their SME. These were therefore manifestations of the cultural patterns of thought, feelings and perceptions that informed the worldview of strategic leaders of agri-based processing SMEs. It is in this way that the researcher was stepping into the world of strategic leaders of SMEs. At this stage, the researcher noted that certain espoused values appeared to oppose or contradict what was practised. Espoused values that did not resonate with the underlying cultural assumptions of any of the other strategic leaders who were interviewed within the SME, were considered as not reflective of the culture in question (Schein, 2010:27-30). The researcher was questioning why things happened or why people felt, perceived or thought in a particular way, paying close attention to any contradictions. The exploration of the meaning underlying these contradictions led to clarification of some of the basic cultural assumptions. An assumption 192