CEJSH

By focusing on the changes to the industrial landscape that can be identified visually and within the materiality of the built environment, this paper discusses the transformation of the industrial landscape and its meaning that has been produced by the human agency that has emerged in damaged industrial places after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence and post-Soviet deindustrialisation. It shows that there is a sense of emptiness related to the ruination and abandonment of the industrial landscape in people’s experiences and memories of Soviet industrial districts. However, it is evident that such emptiness is a transitional stage that creates the conditions for the emergence of new beginnings. The paper reveals that the industrial districts today are active places in which various individual economic activities and economic structures have emerged. The research is based on the two Lithuanian former Soviet industrial cities of Alytus and Marijampolė.

The focus of this research is the virtual learning environment, which is a priority in developing new learning strategies. The aim is to analyze the process to describe policies related to changes in learning environments. The research objectives include examining theoretical approaches to modeling virtual learning environments and highlighting the signs of change in virtual teaching/learning environments from various perspectives. The research focuses on how virtual teaching and learning environment modeling is contextualized within the evolving Lithuanian education policy. This study explores questions regarding the perception of changes in learning environments and the key trends shaping virtual learning within the framework of new education policies.

The article aims to introduce the role of foreign language teaching while using social media in fostering sustainability communication (SC) in higher education (HE) institutions. Foreign language learning enables students to analyse actual topics about sustainable development on social media, to discuss problems, to share personal emotions and experiences. Moreover, ESP curriculum aims to build students’ basic language communicative skills with the focus on sustainability communication when students recall gained information. The article overviews the importance of the SC development on the theoretical level as well as introduces the challenges of SC development relying on social media texts in foreign language classes on the empirical level. One of the most innovative methods of learning/teaching a foreign language is a case study method. It integrates such skills as one’s ability to analyse, think critically, search for solutions and make decisions. The article deals with concepts of professional English development and case analysis based on social media. It presents the findings of the research into students’ attitude towards case study method based on social media texts for developing their professional English communication. The research highlights the problems and peculiarities of applying the method. It has revealed that students have a positive attitude towards assignments involving case study method based on social media texts. They believe that such assignments help develop one’s communication skills of the professional English language.

Student formal assessment is the core axis of the educational process that affects the whole teaching / learning activity, its quality, students’ success experience, their self-respect and self-esteem, and the perception of self-efficacy. By recognising prospects as the main learning objective and defining the outcome as personal and authentic learner progress, the assessment raises the need to pay a due attention to reflection, deep consideration, and feedback to all participants of the educational process. Against this background, doubts are started to be raised about appropriateness of the grade, currently being one of the most popular methods of the formal student assessment, leading to the scientific problem of this article. Over the last few decades, a shift in the assessment has been observed, from the focus exclusively on the end result to a stronger orientation toward the whole educational process, with an emphasis on motivating students to learn and strengthening their involvement in the educational process. These changes are illustrated by the Finnish good practice where, in an environment based on mutual trust and respect, and without questioning the importance and need for testing learners’ knowledge, abilities, and skills in the teaching / learning process, alternative assessment methods: portfolio assessment and learning conversations, are successfully used. To transfer examples of the good practice and adapt them to the national context, it seems reasonable to apply theories and models of change management. Achieving a targeted and effective change in the area of the assessment requires a process-focused approach to the change management.

The banking sector has developed and extended the use of its services in the past decade. In fact, nowadays mobile banking (M-banking) is the most developing service offered by a bank. In order to encourage customers to use m-banking services, it is extremely important to get clients to trust the M-banking services provided by the bank. This article discusses private clients’ trust in mobile banking in Latvia. Hence, the goal of the research is to identify the key factors driving individual customer’s confidence in mobile banking. In order to determine the weight of each factor, expert evaluation method based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used. The results showed that the most vital factor affecting private clients’ trust in mobile banking is customer characteristics, especially customers’ computer literacy. However, after summarizing all the subfactors, it became clear that the most powerful in the trust-building process is convenience/practicality of using a mobile application. However, there is a limitation – the survey was conducted by interviewing experts, which means that the results may differ from the responses of the clients themselves.

The issue of city modelling is very essential these days and it is important to analyse the legal framework and its practical implications in the process of city modelling. However, the practice of urban design in Lithuania is based on two-dimensional solutions and the artistic factor is overlooked. The article reviews the legal basis of Lithuanian urban planning and design and their practical implications and emphasizes the necessity of artistic factor during the process of city modelling.

Abstract – This paper evaluates the Eastern and Central EU regions according to the efficiency level of innovation systems by application of nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA). The most technologically inefficient NUTS2 regions of Central and Eastern EU are identified. The governmental institutions in these regions should enforce a higher level of regional innovative activity, as regional potential to create a higher value to the economy with current resources has not been reached yet.

Nevertheless, the European Commission’s (2013) study shows the declining contribution of production enterprises to GDP. Eurostat (2010) statistics show that small and medium-sized manufacturing companies are very slow to improve their operations and labor productivity. The EU com­panies are anticipated to increase by only 2.4% compared with the US companies, where growth of labor productivity is 3.5% Therefore, innovations are also important for the EU trade and production companies. To sum up the above set out material, it can be said that the application of innovations must be considered as a very complex cognitive subject. The article consists of three parts to fully examine the implementation of innovations in production and trade enterprises. First, literature analysis is carried out and topic related aspects are identified. In the second part the paper presents empirical research methodology. Herein, practices of production and trade enterprises are presented, comparison of production and trade enterprises is carried out, and effects on the activeness of enterprises regarding the opportunities of innovation implementation in this area are analyzed. In the third part the article presents empirical research results, conclusions and recommendations. Literature analysis reveals that the greatest role innovation plays in international companies, however the number of such enterprises is very small in the EU. The results also show that produc­tion and trade companies from Luxembourg have higher competitiveness than the enterprises from other countries. Overall the paper glances into whether, to what extent, how companies innovate, and how this differs between production and trade service industries.

The present article provides research data elicited from the leading managers (experts) of a private security concerning the evaluation of competences. The article offers classifications of the security guard competences and an algorithm for the computation of the level of their importance. The findings show the distribution of competences falling into the categories of very important, important, and slightly important competences. Investigation into the correlation of findings indicates that the system for the evaluation of security guards competences ought to be characterised by a larger number of indices under evaluation.

The article presents a critical analysis of one of the aspects of collective labour relations, mainly employee representation at the company level via works councils. The emergence of the institute of works councils in Lithuania was determined by general Euro-integration processes and the need to develop and promote social dialogue. As we know, after the restoration of independence in Lithuania employee representation at the company level by trade unions was very poor. Therefore, with the view to taking over the tradition of collective labour relations prevailing in Western Europe and promoting the process of collective bargaining and collective agreements, a special law was adopted in Lithuania in 2004 to provide for the establishment and functioning of an alternative employee representation body, works councils. This article aims to reveal, by means of various research methods, the content of EU and national legal norms governing the status of works councils and to show, based on various surveys conducted in the country, the current realistic situation of employee representation in Lithuania.