The Relevance of Agile Change Management in a Dynamic Business Environment

Conventional change management approaches are increasingly reaching their limits in a business environment characterised by volatility, dynamics and complexity. In other contexts, attempts are often made to counter these aspects with agile approaches. The extent to which this also makes sense in the field of change management has not been frequently investigated to date. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine the extent to which agile change management contributes to the successful handling of changes in a dynamic business environment. For this purpose, 30 interviews were conducted with change management and organisational development experts from various small, medium-sized, and large companies in Germany. The data obtained was primarily analysed qualitatively, using a structuring content analysis according to Mayring (2015). The results of the research show that change management can strongly benefit from agility. In particular, this is the case with respect to self-organisation, iteration, and experimentation. Agile change management makes sense even in more conventional, hierarchical organisations. However, there are indeed organisation-, project- or context-specific characteristics that speak particularly in favour of the use of agile change management approaches or make more conventional change management approaches seem more reasonable. Often, it is even advisable to use a clever mixture of both.

Outsourcing and the strategy of organizations in Mexico

Outsourcing has been a very commonly used strategy to increase productivity in a variety of organizations. In Mexico, it can be said that it has had a positive impact on employment rate. Nevertheless, there is a “dark side” in this strategy, since it has been used as a way to avoid direct hiring of employees and to evade fiscal and social security regulations. This document aims to analyze outsourcing from a regulatory and contractual approach, as well as its role as a way to increase the employment rate, and from a managerial perspective. As a result of this analysis, it was found that in our country outsourcing has been a successfully used strategy by many organizations of different sizes, but at the same time, the lack of an appropriate legislation has originated a series of unethical practices. In Mexico, in 2021 a new legal framework that tries to balance the relationship between firms and employees was approved. This paper ends with a reflection of the possible impacts of this new legislation.

Initiating Financial Technology (Fintech) as an Innovation of Communication Technology on Credit Cooperatives in Indonesia

The purpose of this study is to describe the possibility to initiate Finansial Technology (Fintech) as an innovation of communication technology on the credit cooperatives in Indonesia. This study is based on the phenomenon of tremendous growth of credit / financial business by using FinTech in Indonesia . Fintech so far has grew uncontrolablely among illegal financial institutions and gave unexpected impact on lower income people in Indonesia. On the other hand, the credit cooperatives as legal financial institutions which could facilitate lower income people for financial services lag behind. This study used quantitative-desciptive method, and resulted in some findings: (1) Cooperatives can become the fintech P2PL Platform model, as an alternative business model by changing conventional savings and loan businesses into the P2PL platform. The model could also be seen as a solution to prevent moral hazard due to miss-used of this technology among illegal credit instituions, (2) Fintech as an innovation is recognized feasible to apply. It has good relative advantage due to giving more efficiency and effectiveness on mana gement, it has good trialability because it may be easily experimented with on a limited basis, and has good observability because the result is visible to others, it has less complexity since it is easy to learn and apply. This study has implications for policies that fintech flatform model could be developed for credit cooperatives in Indonesia both in rural and urban areas..

Sustainability in the Companies Practices

The sustainability topic is present in our everyday life. No matter if we are traveling in the public transport, we are having coffee with friends or watching tv we hear something related to green economy, sustainable usage of resources or smart energy saving devices. All ads that we see around us, in one way or another, also are calling to be environmentally friendly and sustainable. On national and international level, there are a lot of regulations and requirements developed and enforced both for the business and for the citizens. In the general case, it is commonly accepted, that the companies are taking actions in the field of sustainable development only because they are forced to do so by legislative requirements and penalties. But is it always the case? The paper discusses the main idea standing behind the sustainable development and presents some of the models that summarizes this idea. Further, by reviewing the practices of three large companies in different economic fields, it discusses their approach and attitude towards the subject. Key words: Sustainability, environment protection, business practices

Smart City EU - Lighthouse Projects – Investigation of Economic Benefits

The major European Smart City Lighthouse Projects have gained a lot of attention and importance from the designers of Smart City Initiatives (SCI) since 2014. The EU Commission's funding under the Horizon 2020 program is significant. The supported cities include the European metropolises but also several smaller cities. All these cities are repeatedly named Smart City pioneers. However, the research still has a gap when it comes to value generation. This article deals with the economic benefits of these Lighthouse projects. The own developed categories are applied and proved with Lighthouse projects. The range of economic benefits is shown and evaluated using the qualitative content analysis of the data from the EU - CORDIS database. The sustainability in the Smart City Initiatives is showcased as economic benefit is prioritized higher than cost saving or efficiency.

Towards Unified Literature Representations: Applications in Information Systems and Entrepreneurship Research

Research activity is becoming increasingly complex due to the nature of research topics and questions. Among the essential academic research activities are literature reviews (LR), as they support the advance of the knowledge frontier. To improve literature reviews and their understanding, it would need to have comprehensive literature representations. In this perspective, the paper aims to advance previous work by illustrating a new way of creating thorough literature representations. The proposed tool is innovative and versatile since authors can adopt it in different types of LRs. Its adoption implies the construction of a three-dimensional scheme for the classification of the literature to be analysed. Then, based on the latter and selecting suitable evaluation variables, the proposed approach produces informative multidimensional representations for literature mapping and bibliometric analysis. For exemplifying this, the paper provides two application cases concerning Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and entrepreneurship research.

For An Ecological Awareness of Responsible Living

The entrenched and firm conviction that man is master of nature while being separate from it has fostered the culture of the indiscriminate use of natural resources, the destruction of eco-systems and a waste society. Over recent decades, behind the urgent need to halt the ecological drift, the natural landscape has been of considerable interest in various disciplinary contexts including biology, from which it has gained renewed consideration from the “ecology of landscape” perspective, and ethics. Once the theoretical aspects of the ecology of the landscape concept have been clarified, I will demonstrate that the human condition is part of the natural environment. On this basis I will highlight the necessity for man to develop an ecological awareness founded on responsibility regarding biodiversity. The ethics of responsibility, enlightened by an ecological awareness, have to inspire living and guide environmental policy-making.

Old-New Challenges? Poverty and Menstruation: Young Girls and Women in the Mirror of Disadvantaged Situation

Disadvantaged situation means not just a kind of negative social phenomenon, but its effects manifesting on the economic and social fields are also significant. Regarding its complexity, a holistic view is necessary to approach it, and explore the developed situation, define solution proposals, promote a better quality of life and finally, to monitor prevention processes and revise the proposals if necessary. In case of disadvantaged situation, the involvement of children and women requires special attention in all aspects. The Creative Region research group launched its various research in the multi-stage research of the Higher Education Institutional Excellence Program (in Hungarian: Felsőoktatási Intézményi Kiválósági Program, FIKP) started in 2018 on the University of Miskolc, in which the staff of the Faculty of Health got the opportunity to conduct the comprehensive health mapping of the rural population with the involvement of 25 settlements. Based on the results of the FIKP research, it has been supported from more approaches that disadvantaged situation and deprivation can significantly determine the health behaviour, health consciousness and future life prospects of people living there. The comprehensive research examined the characteristics of the health status of people living in disadvantaged settlements along different dimensions. Getting to know the mental health of young girls and the issue of menstruation days among both them and the adult female population were essential elements of the research. During data recording in 2018 with student girls under the age of 14, we experienced in a high number that the girls’ mental well-being was not ideal, and this also manifested in mild to moderate depression at more of them. The presence of domestic violence affecting them is also not negligible in the region. Our research performed in 2019 also supports that anxiety and the feeling of shame appear strongly among young girls on menstruation days as well, and a certain level of the omission of menstruation hygienic products can also be experienced in the region. Data collection performed in 2020 focused on the adult female population in which we experienced the similar phenomena as in case of young girls. In connection with showing the direction of the areas to be improved and defining the promoting prevention health promotion advice, we should have had to strive for adapting to the population’s demands and the professionals’ flexibility which support the more favourable acceptance of the proposals. The significance of individual care, individual competence improvement and personalized counselling and help is indispensable.

Leadership and Innovation - How Can Leaders Create Innovation-Promoting Environments in Their Organisations?

Innovation is considered to be among the most relevant success factors for companies in the contemporary business environment. Thus, finding strategies and approaches to foster innovation becomes a crucial challenge for managers and leaders alike. The present paper aims to showcase, how the working environment shaped by the present Covid-19 crisis with its enforced work-from-home-setting influences innovation processes. Therefore, an extensive literature review is conducted, where in a first step the challenges of leadership within a telework-environment are established. The author therein explains the differences between classic approaches towards this mode of virtual collaboration and the pandemic-induced, often mandatory approach to telework utilized throughout the pandemic. This leads to a description of how – especially in times of the Covid-19 pandemic – innovation becomes even more crucial for organizations not only in the medical field, as they need to react to a changing environment and, accordingly, changing customer needs. Leadership challenges of finding ways to create and shape innovation-friendly work environments and organizational cultures given the limitations of the situation, are presented and critically discussed.

A Demographic Study of the Multidimensional Poverty of Women in India

Foremost in the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) of the 2030 Agenda, is the goal of achieving “No Poverty”. With nearly a decade yet to go, it is imperative to know the true nature and extent of poverty so that steps can be taken to eradicate poverty in all its forms. Multidimensional Poverty is a problem that persists on a larger extent in a developing country such as India, particularly among its women. The study uses the Demographic Health Survey data – India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS), a nationwide survey conducted with a representative sample of women aged 15 to 49 throughout the country, to shed light on the nature and extent of deprivations faced by them. The deprivations faced by the women are measured along the dimensions of education, health and standard of living as per the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) jointly developed by UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Findings reveal that one-fifth of women in India are multidimensionally poor. Further subgroup decomposition reveals that higher levels of deprivations are found in women living alone, with higher age, having more number of children, widowed or divorced, husbands having multiple wives, those having more than one union and married before the legal age of marriage. The Government needs to focus its attention on the most deprived groups of women. Based on the nature and the extent of deprivations that they face, appropriate measures must be taken to bring them out of their destitution.