Prof Yolanda Jordaan, Head of the Department of Marketing Management, and Prof André Jordaan, professor in the Department of Economics, attended the Winter Global Business Conference in Tignes, France from 2 to 6 February 2015. The focus of the conference, hosted by the Innovation Institute situated in Croatia, was on excelling knowledge on the key ideas about reinventing.

Prof André Jordaan presented a paper on China’s dominance versus the creation of trade opportunities for small countries. Prof Yolanda Jordaan’s research paper shared insights on whether personality is a predictor of a Facebook user's privacy concerns and their usage intensity. The results of the study showed that levels of privacy concern are high, regardless of the personality type. This finding probably provides support for the much-debated ‘privacy paradox’, which aims to explain why users of social media platforms show concern for their privacy, but still continue to reveal much data about themselves. In this case, the privacy paradox extends to personality in that users will always report high privacy concerns since they share private information in a somewhat public space, and this action is independent of personality, just as it is for behaviour.

The conference provided much opportunity for networking. Future research collaborations were discussed with both Sweden and Germany – more specifically with Lund University in Sweden through Veronika Tarnovskaya and Dortmund University in Germany through Dr Hartmut Holzmüller.

Prof Yolanda Jordaan and Prof André Jordaan