Leading global business school Henley Africa has welcomed Professor Daniel Petzer as the new head of research at their Sandton campus. The 49-year-old career academic joined the award-winning business school at the beginning of the January 2021, after a highly successful tenure at the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science where he had been professor of marketing, director of research and ultimately deputy dean of the business school.

• Professor Petzer has been awarded a full professorship in this role, by the University of Reading (UK).
• He is also an associate editor for the European Business Review for Africa and service management.
• Furthermore, Professor Petzer is an editorial board member of the Southern African Business Review (SABR).
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Professor Petzer, was born and bred on a farm in Perdekop, Mpumalanga and went to high school in Meyerton before doing his initial BCom degree at the then Potchefstroom University, as well as his honours and master’s degrees. His PhD was completed at the University of the North West. His first job was as a 23-year-old management and marketing lecturer at the Welkom campus of the then Vista University during the time Henley Africa academic director Frempong Acheampong was based at the Vista head office in Pretoria.

A National Research Foundation (NRF) C2 rated researcher and prolific contributor to academic journals and author of scholarly papers, Professor Petzer taught at Monash South Africa, the University of Johannesburg and North West University before joining the University of Pretoria. It was after leaving Monash that he completed his PhD and developed his passion for research.

I’m an academic at heart and very passionate about research. I’ve got a track record of being able to foster the growth of research capabilities in academic institutions. I’m very excited about joining Henley Africa.

// Henley Business School Africa Head of Research, Professor Daniel Petzer

Professor Petzer, who has supervised countless master’s and doctoral candidates as an academic, believes he can contribute to the growth of the schools research capabilities. His own research is focused on uncovering consumer responses to organisational efforts to build, maintain and restore relationships with customers in a services context, but he says his role will be far broader than that.

I want to be able to equip the MBA students with the necessary skills to conduct their own research as well as foster a culture of research among academics. It’s important that we don’t just do our own academic research, but that we also produce research in the form of thought leadership for our stakeholder’s consumption.

// Henley Business School Africa Head of Research, Professor Daniel Petzer

We pride ourselves on excellence; an excellent faculty is key to serving an excellent student body and Daniel is precisely the kind of person we need to head up our still brand new #HenleyAIR, our Africa Insight and Research institute, which we launched just before the advent of COVID-19 and the start of the lockdown. In South Africa, research and building a better society must work together to create an acceleration of opportunity. We want research at Henley to serve this purpose, to have a relevance and impact that will make a difference to business, to policy, to imagination.

// Henley Business School Africa Dean and Director, Jon Foster-Pedley

#HenleyAIR is part of Henley Africa’s transition from a university school that confers qualifications to a progressive higher education institution that provides relevant research for a country and a continent in desperate need of it, explains Foster-Pedley.

The research, Foster-Pedley says, should provide roadmaps for governments, corporates and institution to navigate their way through some highly contentious issues to ultimately reduce the Gini co-efficient in a way that is open, transparent, fair and sustainable for everyone involved.

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