Developing a Sustainability Framework for Engineering Consulting Firms in South Afric

Engineering consulting firms’ influence on South Africa’s economy is apparent in strategic development projects in the public and private sectors. In this study, a framework for the sustainability of firms was developed that engineering consulting firms could use to survive for extended periods. A convergent mixed methods design was adopted for the study, in which qualitative and quantitative data were collected in parallel and analysed separately. Participants in the study were executives of engineering consulting firms in South Africa with engineering backgrounds. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data, and inferential statistical analysis was used to analyse the quantitative data. Thereafter the two sets of data were integrated using a cross-data comparison joint display. This article describes how the factors that affect the sustainability of engineering consulting firms are both internal and external.