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Learning outcomes This paper aims to present an opportunity to explore the opportunities and challenges involved in running a business with a strongly ingrained social vision in the complex, multi-dimensional environment of an emerging economy. Key learning areas are as follows: How the concept of inclusive innovation applies to the real-world difficulties faced by businesses operating in informal economies. By exploring the tensions between growth and inclusivity in Silulo’s development, students will grasp the challenges entrepreneurs face as a business starts to gain momentum and change, and gain appreciation for the trade-offs that occur when choosing between franchising and organic growth. The challenges of a rapidly evolving technological environment, the need to adapt service offerings at pace, and the importance of balancing financial considerations with deeper social values will find application far beyond the informal economy context of the Silulo story. Case overview/synopsis This teaching case looks at Silulo Ulutho Technologies via CEO Luvuyo Rani and the challenges he faces in balancing expansion and profitability with its mission of empowering disenfranchised communities – challenges exacerbated by a changing telecommunications environment, with more widespread internet availability, mobile phones and online training courses encroaching on Silulo’s traditional service offering. Complexity academic level This case focusses primarily on the processes of inclusive innovation and is suitable for graduate courses in social entrepreneurship, business model innovation, sustainability, business and society, strategic management, emerging markets, business in Africa and organisational studies in general. The case is suitable for Masters of Business Administration (MBA) and Executive MBA academic programmes and delegates on Executive Education programmes. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 3: Entrepreneurship

Since the beginning of his career, J. M. Coetzee’s writing has occupied an uneasy threshold between the literary ideals of European modernism, with its emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, and the demands of socio-historical accountability that derives from his background as a South African novelist. This article revisits one of Coetzee’s novels in which these tensions come to the fore most explicitly, namely Age of Iron, to argue that it is precisely from the generative friction that arises between these two opposing fields that his writing draws its singularly affective force. I begin by considering the agonistic relationship between transcendent ideals and socio-material demands that marks Coetzee’s account of the classic (“What is a Classic?: A Lecture”), describing it as a defining feature of his literary sensibility. The article then moves on to a reading of Age of Iron that focuses on the protagonist Mrs Curren’s efforts, in the midst of the violent political struggle in apartheid South Africa, to speak in her own voice. My thoughts conclude with the suggestion that Coetzee’s perennial staging of the conflict between a desire for autonomous expression and a socio-historical milieu that is indifferent to that desire can be read as an imaginative form of resistance, in the field of literary expression, to both the pressures of historical determinism and the dangers of postmodern insularity.

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