Reformed curatorship as a strategic approach to resource vulnerability reduction in the South African wine industry

Abstract

The South African wine industry contributes 1.1% to the GDP of South Africa and provides work, directly and indirectly, to over a quarter of a million people. Yet despite established literature depicting various external threats and threatening market conditions, no framework exists to determine the vulnerability to erosion faced by individual wine producers’ resources. The theoretical framework of Curatorship, as proposed by Le-Breton Miller and Miller (2015), provided a solid foundation and inherent nurturing, innovative approach to aid the South African wine industry. This framework is positioned squarely within the realm of the resource-based view of strategic management, creating opportunities for definitive contribution to existing bodies of knowledge. However, an aggressive and critical review of the literature on which Curatorship was based necessitated enough changes to rename the framework and rework it into a scientifically testable, explanatory model. As such, the framework was renamed Reformed Curatorship. Not only was a scale instrument derived from the literature, but also a ‘step-by-step’ scale creation framework, which could be used within the managerial sciences. A smaller, yet highly reliable sample was tested. The sample was subjected to case screening, exploratory factor analysis, reliability testing, regression analysis and PLS-SEM. Thus, the South African wine industry became a multi-industry vessel against which this scale was subjected to and analysed accordingly. The scale proved reliable and valid to a large extent. From an explanatory viewpoint, only the construct of ‘ambiguity’ proved to harbour statistically significant explanatory power, along with some predictive power relating to ‘firm performance’, the dependent variable. However, the small sample does provide a limitation on the results, along with the time it took to conduct the research and the energy expended. Amongst several contributions to literature and industry, the two most notable contributions are the 34-point step-by-step scale creation framework, and the operationalisation of the original Curatorship framework into a tested and useful model related to firm performance. This research also led to several new suggested avenues of research. Ultimately, this research established Reformed Curatorship as a strategic approach to resource vulnerability reduction in the South African wine industry.