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.

Neuroscience and its implementation in work with human resources is an important part of managerial work. It helps to understand people and the processes of motivation, learning, and adaptation to new situations and reactions to changes in human resource management. Implementing new trends in work with human resources is also very important for ensuring the sustainability of family businesses as an irreplaceable part of national economies. Their implementation is helped by the fact that many of the family food businesses are going through the process of generational change, and family business leadership is being taken over by a generation of young managers - leaders. The contribution aimed to discover how the younger generation of managers perceives neuroscience and where they see the opportunity for its application in human resources management. Our research focused on the younger generation of managers -leaders in Slovakia's small and medium-sized food family businesses. A structured controlled interview was used for qualitative data collection, which was statistically evaluated using the Text mining method. As we discovered, some new neuroscience-based practices are already gradually being applied. By focusing our research also on a different view of the implementation of neuroscience into managerial work by gender, the conclusion is that female, young managers focused on using neuroscience to improve the working environment and in the area of human leadership. Young men as managers, were more focused on the growth of employees who already work in the company to be even more efficient and better manage the learning process. It is a very positive finding that young managers of small and medium-sized food enterprises in Slovakia have already begun actively introducing innovative methods of working with human resources using neuroscience knowledge.