: The transformation to Industry 4.0 increases the number of robots installed within industries, which brings great shifts in industrial ecosystems. For this reason, our research goal was to analyze ...the key performance indicators to investigate the economic and social sustainability of the changes in production.
: The combination of official (World Bank, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) and publicly available (Federal Reserve Economic Data, Industrial Federation of Robotics) data was used for statistical data processing, including comparison, correlation, cross-correlation and vector autoregression analysis, to present the past developments and also to predict future trends within the U.S. manufacturing sector.
In contrast to robust industry robotization observed in the 2008–2018 period, the share of manufacturing output and employment declined. Nonetheless, the vector autoregression model forecast shows, that the U.S. manufacturing sector has arrived at a turning point, after which robotization can increase employment and labor productivity of workers, while also stimulating further growth of their education levels.
The transition to Industry 4.0 has a major impact on increasing demands for new knowledge and skills for increased productivity. Accordingly, forecasted growths of analyzed manufacturing indicators suggest that negative impacts of robotization in the recent past were only temporary, due to the entrance to the Industry 4.0 era. Nonetheless, additional policies to support sustainable industry development are required.
An individual’s value system plays an important role in their intimate relationship or marriage. Most marital satisfaction research to date has been carried out in high-income liberal Western ...societies. We conducted an original quantitative empirical survey of virtues and values to examine their effect on relationship quality and stability in a sample of 511 respondents from Slovenia, a post-socialist society in transition. The results showed that respondents rated health, love, and safety at the top of their hierarchy of values. The key finding was that the presence of love was associated with an individual’s subjective perception of relationship quality but had no effect on the self-evaluation of relationship stability. In addition to love, both family safety and comfort were significant correlates of relationship quality while self-respect was negatively correlated with relationship quality. Only excitement was found to have a statistically significant effect on relationship stability.
Accelerated trends of digitalisation and media convergence contribute to an increasingly important role of radio in modern society. In the last decade, the researchers have seen in the field of radio ...broadcasting in the Republic of Slovenia an overwhelming expansion of radio broadcasters who acquired the radio broadcasting licences. The topic of this paper are issued radio broadcasting licences and granted statuses of station of special importance within radio broadcasting activity. Based on our own research of secondary data obtained from the documentation of coregulators in the field of broadcasting for the period from 2004 to 2014, they attempted to identify the modus operandi of radio broadcasters in their everyday practice after acquiring the licences and statuses. Findings of their research indicate that the radio broadcasters over the period considered have often changed programme-related requirements and limitations resulting from their licences and the Mass Media Act, while broadcasting and distributing programming contents.
In this article, we will present an empirical account on management of intercultural differences. The focus will be on managerial dilemma how to achieve the company's competitiveness with adaptation ...to market forces as well as to the cultural environment in which they operate. The contemporary companies in global economy need competent management with willingness, awareness, knowhow and skills to successfully communicate and operate across cultural borders. Because they are not visible on the surface, they represent an overlooked factor that can have an impact on the organisation's success. In our qualitative empirical study on the sample of 28 managers from Slovenia, EU, and former Yugoslavia, we try to find out how their intercultural competences affect everyday business activities, whether the management is neglecting the impact of cultural factors, and whether the reason for such neglecting is the lack of intercultural competences. In the discussion and conclusion of the article listed are recommendations to managers and suggestions to academics for further exploration. Adapted from the source document.
Local and regional similarities and differences in the organisational culture of the national postal operator were discussed. Its business units are present in all Slovenian regions. The main ...objective of the research is to discover the prevailing type of the organisational culture in the company. For this purpose, we used Cameron and Quinn's questionnaire. We suppose that among certain business units in different Slovenian regions there are both affinities and substantial differences in the perception of the organisational culture. The results showed that we can classify business units of the organisation according to the organisational culture in two heterogeneous groups.
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND FAIR TRADE Jelovac, Dejan; Rihtaršič, Tanja
Innovative issues and approaches in social sciences,
1/2014, Volume:
7, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Open access
In this article we will present different theoretical views and positions on social entrepreneurship, fair trade, buying consumer behaviour and ethical consumerism. The Fair Trade, which is well ...recognized throughout the world, is an example of good practice of social entrepreneurship. Similarly, globalization processes, the pressure of large corporations, the rapid transmission of information, more and more developed ethical consumer behaviour is clearly contributed to both, the successful development of fair trade and social entrepreneurships. In the empirical part we reviewed and confirmed three of three sets of hypotheses through the quantitative research in Slovenia on sample of 253 respondents. Through the results of our study we also recognized the existence of opportunities for the development of social entrepreneurships in Slovenia. In the discussion and conclusion of the article listed are recommendations for further exploration of ethical consumerism, the development of social entrepreneurship and rising the profile of Fair Trade in Slovenia.
In this article, the researchers developed a model based on the insight into different theories and empirical studies about impact of economic crisis on intimate relationship. With the economic ...crisis, the behaviour of individual in a relationship also changed. Increased stress is one of the reactions of individual to the crisis, and this directly or indirectly influences his or her intimate relationship. That impact is manifested as a factor of the decrease of stability and quality of such relationship. As a starting point, they took the fact that the individual in developed western societies is adapted to the mainstream of so-called consumer society, which discourages him or her to strive for the intimate relationship, and the purpose of such relationship is the preservation of family. On the contrary, this encourages individual's selfish principle to satisfy his or her comfort and convenience. Based on these findings, they developed the intimate relationship stress model, which could be used in further empirical studies and psychotherapy practices.
Companies that work in multicultural environments face several challenges in their everyday business life. In this article we focus on the communication aspect of working in multicultural business ...environments. We test the hypothesis that companies that work in multicultural environments are subject to communication barriers due to different cultural backgrounds of people that engage in these types of communication. We test the hypothesis through a case study of two companies, one from Bosnia and Herzegovina and one from Slovenia, that engage in mutual multicultural communication. Through an in-depth interview with the project manager who takes part in this communication every day and a survey with the employees, we identify and analyse the communication barriers that the employees perceive as relevant to their business processes. We overcome these barriers through the application of the fruitful intercultural business communication model. The main contribution of this work lies in demonstrating the applicability of this model to practical cases and the demonstration of the fact that cultural barriers can exist and inhibit successful business even in environments in close sociocultural and geographic proximity. Adapted from the source document.
This article examines the self-reflexion of Slovenian entrepreneurs to their own business activity, with a focus on their core values and virtues, which would consequently affect the performance, ...growth and development of entrepreneurship in Slovenia. The article starts with a theoretical understanding of organizational values and moral virtues of entrepreneurs and review of the recent empirical studies as the basis on which it is possible to achieve the explanation of the attitude of Slovenian entrepreneurs towards entrepreneurship. We have conducted our own empirical quantitative study on the representative sample of Slovenian entrepreneurs (n = 114). Using the obtained results, we tried to verify the six hypotheses. We were particularly interested in those hypotheses that presuppose the entrepreneur who highly appreciates and respects the values and virtues of an ethical businessperson in practice, will be more economically successful. Based on the results of our research we indicated that the Slovenian entrepreneurs are largely aware of the relevant organizational values and moral virtues, although this is not always obvious in their actions in everyday business practices. The article concludes with an interpretation of the results and discussion of the prospects and challenges for further exploration of the topics covered. Adapted from the source document.
The overload of data and information (including misinformation) that fill the World Wide Web and which are generally in circulation, became our contemporary problem, as information reliability is ...very often doubtful. Insofar as there is more information in circulation, their usage is reduced proportionally and, consequently, their meaning is reduced proportionally. Digital skills of EU citizens in general are underdeveloped, while amount of digital data grows exponentially. For this reason, constant development of digital competences and ICT literacy as a result of systematic education, social control, criteria for verifying reality, recognition of fake data, etc, is required.
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