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As women’s position in the economy and society is often explained by cultural factors, this study aims to verify whether the observed changes in female empowerment in the region of Central and East European (CEE) countries of the European Union (EU) are associated with masculinity as a cultural trait.

The authors apply the k-means clustering method to group CEE countries into clusters with similar levels of female empowerment in two time points – 2013 and 2019. Next, the authors examine the clusters and cross-reference them with the national culture’s masculinity to explore the interrelations between female empowerment and cultural traits in the CEE countries and their development in time.

The analyses reveal that female empowerment is not uniform or stable across the CEE countries. The masculinity level is not strongly related to women’s position in these countries, and changes in female empowerment are not closely linked to masculinity.

Despite the tumultuous history of women’s empowerment in the CEE countries, the issues related to gender equality and cultural traits pertaining to the region are relatively understudied in the literature. By focusing on the CEE region, the authors fill the gap in examining the independencies between female empowerment and cultural masculinity.

Although several theoretical concepts imply different determinants of female entrepreneurship, the literature lacks a consensus on their significance. The aim of this paper is to verify how industry specificity influences the gender pay gap and its relation to female entrepreneurship.

The authors distinguish industries based on the gender equality level, measured jointly by two factors: pay gap level and female participation rate. The study has been conducted among 22 European countries with relatively similar institutional backgrounds. The authors carry out the analysis based on the panel regression models, which enable the authors to verify two predefined research questions.

The results of panel regression models indicate that industry specificity plays a significant role in the relation between the pay gap and female entrepreneurship. Generally, it can be concluded that gender pay gap as a measure of gender inequality is dependent on the industry specificity. The dependence is especially visible in the breakdown of male- and female-dominated industries.

The findings are consistent with the assumption that the gender pay gap is a discriminatory factor for women willing to become entrepreneurs in certain industries. The findings of the study may constitute a vital tool in planning to overcome it.

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has severely disrupted businesses around the world. To address the impact of operational and strategic business disruptions, this paper contributes to the practice of a firm's management in terms of identifying the determinants of organizational resilience (OR) and creating a hierarchical model of the potential sources of a firm's adaptive capability.

A novel research framework integrating Pareto analysis, grey theory and total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) has been applied to, first, identify the sources of a company's resilience and, second, to determine contextual relations among these sources of OR.

The findings of the survey highlight three primary sources that allow companies to build companies' resilience: access to financial resources, digitization level and supply chain (SC) collaboration. The authors' model shows that resilience cannot be viewed as a particular feature but rather as a dynamic intertwined network of different co-dependent sources.

The proposed hierarchical model indicates that the most crucial sources of company's resilience in the recent pandemic are access to financial resources, digitization level and SC collaboration.

The study takes an original investigation on cognitive grounds, touching on the problem of firms' resilience to the unique nature of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also represents one of the few attempts to use integrated Pareto analysis, grey theory and TISM to examine this critical area of firm management.

Purpose: Since the referendum in 2016, European companies have taken pre-Brexit measures to face the uncertainty over the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. The purpose of the chapter is to identify and discuss the strategies of Polish companies in face of Brexit.

Methodology: The chapter presents results of an empirical quantitative analysis. The data have been collected with the use of Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) method with a pre-defined questionnaire. The research focuses on 500 Polish companies active in the British market and involves a cluster analysis.

Findings: The conducted analysis enabled us to distinguish four main groups of companies: observers, cautious expanders, opportunity seekers, and diversifiers.

Most of the companies decided to adjust their strategies and take an active approach in the time of uncertainty. The majority relied on their existing product/service portfolio and only the diversifiers engaged in both: new market entries and new product/service development. Data from the survey show that companies feared mostly the “no deal” scenario and many of their decisions ahead of Brexit were motivated by it.

Value: The strategies identified in the analysis relate to those we can find in the Ansoff’s matrix. It has been shown that cautious expanders and diversifiers coincide with the exact Ansoff strategies of Diversification and Market development. Two other strategies, on the other hand – observers and opportunity seekers are hybrids of the existing Ansoff ones.

Brexit has caused a visible disruption to the established and accepted web of rules governing European markets. Our study, based on a survey of Polish firms operating in the UK market, aims to identify Polish firms’ perceptions of Brexit and select characteristics of groups of firms exhibiting similar perceptions of uncertainty. The perception of uncertainty itself was measured along two separate dimensions – uncertainty about future arrangements between the EU and the UK and uncertainty about institutional agility in the UK. The results are analyzed using the cluster method. The findings identify three types of firms that we have named as alarmist, the concerned, and the oasis of peace, within which the largest group are companies that view Brexit as a non-significant threat (the oasis of peace), unlike the other two groups (alarmist and the concerned). Those perceived differently are mostly firms having larger size, greater involvement into the British market and longer-term experience in that market.

Crises are often studied in international business (IB) research as the external “context” for business strategies, but firms can also be active participants in the unfolding of crises. The study of crises in IB could benefit greatly from studying the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) as active participants, rather than as mere passive actors, responding to exogenous events. History shows that IB crises typically unfold partially as exogenous processes, and partly as the result of MNE strategies. A multilevel and longitudinal approach to studying crises in IB is clearly necessary. This chapter considers the extent to which smaller events that preceded the present crisis – since 1989 – point to systemic problems in global governance. It also defines five overlapping lenses through which future IB studies can further create relevant insights on how to deal with crises: historic, macro, meso, micro and exogenous. The chapter finally serves as an introduction to the whole Progress in International Business Research volume by indicating the relevance of all parts and chapters that follow.