GEOBASE (Elsevier)

The process of companies undertaking adaptation in the face of changing conditions which have been influenced by factors such as globalisation, technological changes, environmental changes, competition, political decisions, worker mobility, population structure, and so on, is one of the major challenges of modern corporate governance. Changes in a company are inevitable, but they do not always directly correlate with the employee’s sense of security, including whether the employee feels safe about their workplace, in-come, of future roles in the company in the face of potential changes. There is an inverse relationship between the employee’s sense of security and their time spent with the company. One way of managing this which can help to ensure a sense of security for employees within the company is to directly involve them in the process of implementing changes in the organisation. The main goal of this paper is to highlight the principal aspects of employee engagement in change management processes and to gain an increased level of understanding in terms of the implementation of change at the organisational level by involving employees. Research methods: a systematic and comparative analysis of concepts and methods which have been published in the available scientific literature, statistical processing, an instrumental case study, interviews, surveys, and a content analysis of strategic documents; followed by modelling. The theoretical contribution of the paper demonstrates construction of methodology quidded on the Emergent perspective and new theoretical insights on professional discourse. Practical input shows that employee involvement in change processes is directly related to the speed of strategic change in the company

The creative economy is one of the fastest developing sectors in the global economy, providing income growth, new jobs and export earnings. In addition to economic benefits that flow from cultural and creative industries, the aforementioned contribute to resolving issues of sustainable urban development, as well as contributing to the 2030 Agenda, which is the main initiative of the United Nations. Although it is acknowledged by scholars that creativity promotes inclusive social progress and empowers people to take responsibility for their own economic, social and personal development and encourages innovation, which contributes significantly to sustainable growth, there is lack of empirically tested results. The article aims to analyse the linkages between the implementation of sustainable development goals achieved by countries, and the development of the creative economy in such countries. The empirical data were collected for comparison of creativity and sustainability indexes by reference to the case study of the Baltic States. Policy implications were provided based on the research conducted. The study found that Estonia is the best performing country in terms of measures of creativity and assessments of that country's creative economy. Furthermore, Estonia is the most sustainable country, and has achieved the greatest progress in implementing sustainable development goals of any of the Baltic States. All of the environmental indicators for Latvia, and taking into account Lithuania's economic indicators place these two countries at the same level in terms of sustainability.

The study is dedicated to analysis of sustainable regional energy planning challenge's in order to reach carbon-free economy in 2050. The case study of hydropower development in selected region of Poland provides good example how to deal practically with identified sustainable regional energy planning problems to address restrictions of environmental requirements and natural conditions on the least costs hydropower generation planning in a given region. The aim of the article is to develop a model for optimizing hydropower production and to apply this model for selected region. The West Pomeranian region was selected for this case study, and the time range for planning is from 2019 to 2030. The selected region is particularly predestined for the production of renewable energy sources. Constructed model and obtained results for optimization of hydropower development in selected region is useful for fostering usage of renewable energy sources in Poland and moving forward towards carbonfree economy target set by European Union for 2050

The European Union (EU) is an integrated alliance of equally treated Member States sharing mutual values, legal principles and markets. Close cooperation, deep integration and convergence are the major priorities for the EU. Anyway, these principles are not always reflected in the EU-wide policies which are implemented through financial support mechanisms. The direct payments financial support mechanism under the Common Agricultural Policy, the main instrument for promoting convergence in development of Member States’ agricultural sectors and rural sustainability, faces critique for failing to meet its objectives. One of the major deficiencies of the direct payments scheme is that it allocates more resources to already developed agricultural sectors of the older Member States and less resources to developing ones thus increasing the divergence among the Member States. The aim of this paper is to suggest new mechanisms for direct payment funds redistribution across the EU Member States which are based on the methodological principles that would more precisely correspond to the aims of convergence, transparency and fair redistribution. The results show that, regardless of the method chosen (to support more or less effective agricultural sectors of EU Member States), the proposed methodology lowers differences in direct payment rates among the EU Member States by two-fold. This ensures correspondence to the goal of convergence within the EU.

International activities of firms contribute to environmental socio-economic development and have a positive influence on prosperity of countries. The novelty of this study is to extend prevailing theory on the performance measurement of internationalized firms by suggesting a hybrid decision-making model based on interval type 2 fuzzy sets for the Baltic states. The integrated method is defined as the interval type-2 (IT2) decision making trial and evaluation laboratory qualitative flexible multiple criteria method (DEMATEL-QUALIFLEX). IT2 DEMATEL is used for weighting each criterion of internationalized firms and IT2 QUALIFLEX is applied for ranking the Baltic states, respectively. Within this context, six different criteria are defined for ranking the internationalized firms of the Baltic states. The ranking of all three countries enable us to conclude that Estonia demonstrates the best results of internationalized firms. Meanwhile, Latvia has the worst performance of internationalized firms. The findings are useful for decision makers responsible for supportive policies focused on the research and development (R&D) and internationalization of firms. The implications for managers lie in the awareness of necessary conditions for successful internationalization. The study extends prevailing knowledge on the performance measurement of internationalized firms and provides findings on multinational companies (MNCs) in the Baltic states’ context.

Creation of a sustainable agricultural sector involves boosting the cooperation activities as these contribute to the societal and economic development of the farms, farmers and rural societies. This paper contributes to the literature on the analysis of the drivers and obstacles of cooperation development in agriculture. The case of Lithuania is considered as the cooperation activities are lagging behind the European Union (EU) practice here. Specifically, analysis of the public support measures and the expert survey are carried out to analyse the effectiveness of the public policy measures as represented in the relevant legal acts. The experts involve policy makers, farmers’ organisations and academia, which are the major stakeholder groups in Lithuania. The results indicate the effectiveness of the measures linked to capacity building (in the sense of human capital) requires improvement, whereas those related to financial support and promotion of the farmers’ organisations are much better perceived. Thus, public support measures are available to promote cooperation in agriculture, yet the legal system of Lithuania still requires improvement in accommodating effective agricultural cooperatives.