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Fraud has metamorphosed into a major global concern. Regardless of size, profitability, or industry, organizations currently face severe challenges concerning economic and operational sustainability in the wake of deliberate and unethical fraudulent acts. The PricewaterhouseCoopers (hereinafter referred to as PwC) (2020) survey revealed that 47% of international firms were affected by fraud compared to 49% in 2018, 36% in 2016, 37% in 2014, and 34% in 2011. The PwC’s (2020) survey respondents reported total losses of 42 billion USD owing to fraud that negatively impacted brands, reputations, and market shares. Ironically, only 56% of the affected organizations conducted investigations, whereas barely one-third of these companies reported fraudulent outcomes to their boards.

Identifying the optimal location for a business in a market environment depends on the quality and availability of up-to-date information on comparable businesses, maintaining the conditions of comparability, selection of indicators and the methods of analysis of the financial and economic position of the business in the space. In this paper, food retail stores are evaluated. We have focused on this type of organization, because they are also of some importance for people from smaller towns, especially villages where there is only 1 store. In the event of its closure, residents are dependent on travelling to larger cities. Doing business in food retail is not as easy as it seems. With the arrival of retail chains, there was a significant reversal in consumer purchasing behaviour. People began preferring cheaper and lower-quality food. Today, the situation has changed and a growing number of consumers also place emphasis on the quality of food sold. They pay for quality and safe food.

Since 2012, the EU has been working on the issue of active aging and intergenerational solidarity. The Eras project (2012) aimed to draw European society’s attention to the key factors associated with the forthcoming demographic changes, which make it necessary to consider the position of older people in society (Gabrižová, 2017). In the Slovak Republic, in order to create better conditions for seniors, National Programs for active aging were created for the years 2014–2020, aimed at a target group of 50 years and older. The share of older age cohorts in the total population is growing. According to the scenario of average population development of the largest cities in Slovakia (Šprocha et al., 2017) in the city of Nitra, which is the subject of this study, more than 46% of the population over 50 should live by 2035, out of which up to 30% will reach more than 60 years.

Usage of cloud services instead of traditional on-premise resources is a common approach that organizations widely prefer. The COVID-19 situation, even more, highlighted the importance and advantages of cloud computing. The reason is that ‘home-office’ has become a normal and widely adopted way of working in many worldwide organizations. The homeoffice results in the requirements that the data and resources need to be available everywhere over the internet. The target of this article is to identify how the consumption of cloud services differs in the Czech Republic (referred also as ‘Czechia’), Visegrád Group where the Czech Republic is a member and in the European Union in general.Since the adoption of cloud services has an increasing trend, as was described above, the comparison will indicate whether the consumption of the Czech Republic corresponds to the consumption in the countries from Europe.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound and immediate impact on humanity and organizations worldwide. Companies were confronted with a challenging business environment and the growing importance of information and communication technologies (ICT). Entities of all sizes have been exposed to the unprecedented virus-driven need to adapt their business models to rapidly changing requirements. It is already evident that the need for speed will not be temporary – digitization, globalization, automation, analytics, and other drivers of change will also accelerate. To recover and thrive in the contemporary volatile and complex world, leaders will have to quickly adapt to the market and socio-psychological alterations. Agile methodology is not a novelty. For decades, the ICT industry has been using it to improve productivity and motivation, enhance product quality, and shorten the time to market.

The high pace of strategic and organisational changes in the current financial services sector is not only caused by the fundamental transformation in the institutional and competitive environment but also by the rapid expansion of technological innovations (Menshikova et al., 2017). The restructuring of the modern labour market and traditional human resources qualification requirements is to a large extent impacted by Industry 4.0 (Smirnova et al., 2019) that is directly connected with a transformation of knowledge sharing processes, data processing and integration and value orientation, which the companies consider essential for their success (Blštáková et al., 2020). Customer centricity, personalisation, mobility and agile corporate culture are becoming key factors to ensure an innovative pace of development in the digital environment (Ajupov et al., 2019). In this regard, the demand for highly educated specialists directly involved in customer service in banking and insurance institutions has been increasing especially as a lack of a qualified workforce is among the most important drivers for Industry 4.0 (Stentoft & Rajkumar, 2020).

In recent years, the fund shortage faced by worldwide rural economic development has become a common plight, which cannot be resolved through peasants’ saving and loaning behaviours with rural financial institutions as intermediary agents. Agriculture can hardly be the credit object because of the long agricultural production cycle, slow capital operation, short and concentrated labour time, partially low labour efficiency, and strong dependence on the natural environment (Bianco, 2020). Thus, rural economic development lacks external financing paths (Donou-Adonsou & Sylwester, 2017; Liu & Liu, 2020). The situation is not optimistic in China, either. In the initial years after the founding of New China, financial policies were formulated to solve rural capital constraints and support agricultural development. Since 1978, rural financial development successively experienced four major phases: development recovery, expansion, supplementation and perfection, and deepened reform and innovation.

Since December 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spread rapidly on a global scale (WHO, 2021), strongly affecting organizations from all sectors of activity. Employees, in particular (ILO, 2020), have been forced to quickly alter their work behaviors and manner of working, being obliged to abandon commuting to the workplace and resort to large-scale remote working (Nemțeanu et al., 2021a). The pandemic has made its strongest imprint on the sector of services (Fernandes, 2020), for whom teleworking has become ‘the new normal’ (Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés, 2020; Nemțeanu & Dabija, 2021). This new context has dramatically altered task performance – employee productivity having been strongly affected due to the time needed to adapt to the new reality and working conditions (Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés, 2020).

Industrial clusters have been considered a successful form of firms’ organisation, and an instrument for increasing the competitiveness and growth of the region and firms’ performance (Aranguren et al., 2013; Abdesslem & Chiappini, 2016; Stojčić et al., 2019; Pecze, 2019). The idea behind cluster formation and its promotion is that firms benefit from agglomeration effects due to knowledge and technology spillovers, input and output sharing, and location externalities (Maffioli et al., 2016). Cluster organisations should facilitate collaboration among firms, scientific and public actors, networking, inter-firm linkages, sharing of information, resources, and knowledge to build new growth opportunities, and overcome coordination failures (Maffioli et al., 2016). Past research has examined the impact of clusters on firm performance in various industries and the wood industry as well, indicating that cluster membership has a positive impact on firms’ survival, innovation activities and performance – exports, productivity, and sales (e.g., Strøjer et al., 2003; Tödtling & Trippl, 2004; Wennberg & Lindqvist, 2008; Eisingerich et al., 2010; Abdesslem & Chiappini, 2016; Stojčić et al., 2019).

Business activities’ significance in economies worldwide underscores the importance of studying companies’ operations to determine their managers’ ability to adapt to changes arising from globalization. Business organizations and management aspects, however, include such a wide range of factors needing analysis that these variables must first be defined and the most relevant factors selected. This study sought to deepen the existing knowledge about managers’ preferences regarding the use of communication to generate employee participation in strategic business management processes. This topic is of particular interest in the Canary Islands, which is a complex area from an economic perspective due to its geographical fragmentation and distance from the main production centres that stimulate trade. These islands also depend significantly on external supplies of essential goods and have limited industrial and agricultural sectors but a quite dominant service sector.