Search results

Common availability of digital technologies encouraged companies in almost all industries to focus on exploring various ways of benefiting from their adoption and thus taking steps toward their digital transformation. This paper aims to describe the digital transformation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as a challenging opportunity and identify ways in which companies from the food industry address it.

The paper presents empirical evidence based on a case study of the Polish freeze-drying market and companies operating on it. This study adopted a single case study research method to describe the digital transformation journey of SMEs. The sample constitutes a single sectoral case study with more than one unit of analysis – sixteen companies. The undertaken approach follows an embedded case study design and allows for an extensive and multidimensional analysis of rich empirical data.

The results of this analysis allowed to identify four significant trends describing human resources involvement in the digital transformation of freeze-drying companies in Poland (i.e. visionary top-down, cooperative task-oriented, persuasive bottom-up, chaotic), a detailed catalog of outcomes of digital transformation from the perspective of food industry companies grouped in seven categories and a list of main barriers to digital transformation.

This paper contributes to expanding knowledge on the practices of food industry companies in addressing challenges posed by the development of information technology and the dynamically changing environment after the COVID-19 pandemic. It contributes further to the discussion related to context-, industry- and country-specific barriers to digital transformation, identifying time-related constraints as an essential barrier to digital transformation.

Realities of food insecurity are more pronounced with a specific focus on women in developing countries. The need to understand the varied food insecurity experiences among female-headed agricultural households in such contexts provided the rationale and motivation for this study.

The study employed a quantitative cross-sectional approach, drawing on the binary logistic regression to determine the influence of socioeconomic status on household coping mechanisms in response to food insecurity in a stratified random sample of 509 female-headed agricultural households in Liberia.

The results revealed that most respondents experienced food insecurity reflected in inadequate food availability, an inability to eat nutritious food and the necessity to skip meals. In response, they employed coping strategies such as borrowing money, selling assets, and reducing health expenses, which were influenced by socioeconomic characteristics such as gender, education, and marital status.

The study illustrates the multi-layered and complex context of food insecurity among women. From these findings, the study proposes the consideration of such dynamics to inform practical and relevant mitigatory policy approaches to the target demographic.

With food insecurity being a social problem, the study identifies its social impact by documenting the participants' lived experiences. Thus, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of food insecurity across different segments of society.

The study draws its originality from understanding how food insecurity impacts female-headed households, highlighting the often-ignored gender dynamics of food insecurity in developing nations and aggregating the coping strategies and food insecurity expenses.