Social sustainability is slowly becoming a more important aspect of a company’s management, particularly in the case of multinational companies with an international network of subsidiaries placed in diverse cultural and social environments. The concept of social sustainability is strongly connected with a considerable number of stakeholders, compared to the environmental and economic aspects of sustainability. The nature of activities under the social pillar of corporate responsibility connects social sustainability with family business, which aims at the principles of social solidarity, equality and ethics. This article uniquely analyzes selected aspects of social sustainability on a sample of 201 Slovak subsidiaries of foreign multinationals and finds differences between family and nonfamily ones. Surprisingly, the conducted research proved that the examined family businesses cannot be considered as bearers of social sustainability in Slovakia, since, in many aspects, the nonfamily businesses implemented the monitored aspects in larger measures, and there were only two factors that turned out to be significant, according to the type of business ownership. Equal opportunities in the workplace were the only variable, due to which significant differences were seen, according to the factor of a family business and the factor of employees’ gender simultaneously, which makes it a crucial variable. The conducted study fills the gap in explanation of interconnections between social sustainability, family business and equal gender opportunities, which makes it unique not just in Slovak conditions.
Generational transfer is a risky point in the life cycle of any family business, and thus the succession process should not be underestimated. Family businesses in Slovakia began to appear after 1989, and therefore many of them await the process of generational exchange in the coming years. For this reason, research on generational exchange has been limited. The aim of this paper was to evaluate the attitude of the owners of Slovak family businesses to the succession process and to reveal the key factors that positively or negatively affect this process. A semi-structured interview was selected as a tool for data collection, in which 74 family business owners took part. The findings were evaluated by the text mining method and afterwards transferred to a scatter diagram in concepts. Based on the clusters in the scatter plot, we revealed the key factors that the current owners consider to be a risk in successfully managing generational exchange. We found that only 48.64% of owners started the succession process, which proves the importance of solving the problem in Slovakia.
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