Roxana Săvescu’s research while affiliated with Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu and other places

The scope of the paper is to describe and interpret the steps and activities that led to the development and implementation of a community-based participatory research program that involved an university, local businesses and community organizations, local autorithies and an external funder. Specifically, the paper addresses the following two questions: first, how was this program designed and implemented, and second, what lessons can be learned from this experience that might be extended to the field of community-based research generally? The instrumental case study methodology was applied and the CBPR Program considered is UniverCity Romania.

In the field of teleworking research, there are still many gaps and unexplored topics, as it is no longer news that teleworking has seen significant growth in recent years. There are still many important aspects that need attention, starting from understanding how this working model will evolve in the long run to understanding what its effects will be on employees, employers, the quality of work performed and the economy as a whole. Many employees want workplace flexibility and the ability to work from home or remotely, and teleworking research can help them understand their requirements and preferences and develop appropriate policies. It is essential to understand whether teleworking affects employee productivity and performance, and this study can provide data to assess these aspects and identify factors contributing to their increase or decrease. Through this study, we aim to come up with new elements to help outline the image of the working days carried out by employees who perform their work tasks in telework, through a comparative analysis with the activity registered by a company that carries out the activity from the office.

This paper presents a framework for designing external financial intervention mechanisms in the form of partnership agreements between financial institutions and different economic participants involved in the farm machinery supply chain. The scope of these partnership agreements is to facilitate small farmers’ access to loans when purchasing agricultural equipment. The research methodology and research results are drawn from desk and field research conducted on the emerging agricultural market. Several inclusive conceptual models of financing mechanisms based on business relationships between financial institutions, small farmers and either the suppliers of agricultural equipment or buyers of agricultural outputs are presented.

Media plays a critical role in shaping public opinion and policy on global issues related to sustainable development. As such, journalism higher education has an important responsibility to prepare journalism students to report on sustainable development issues and to promote the Sustainable Development Goals. However, integrating the SDGs into journalism curricula presents several challenges. This article reviews the current state of teaching the SDGs in European journalism higher education and identifies the challenges and opportunities for integrating the SDGs into journalism curricula. The authors examine the connection between journalism programs, courses and the topics of the SDGs, in the European university environment by accessing existing reports (mainly from institutions like UN, UNESCO, EU-HEIs), studies and articles on SDGs in journalism and the websites of EU-HEIs. The EU universities providing Journalism / Media Programs were selected based on three criteria: i/ the 2020 QS World University Ranking by Subject (subjects used: “communication & media studies”, “development studies”), ii/ Google search based on keywords related to journalism or media education and SDGs and iii/ existing partnerships LBUS has with European universities in the field of journalism and media.

Our study contributes to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of research engagement and productivity of academics, particularly those from developing country contexts that are currently not well-represented in the literature. Thirty-seven Romanian public universities grouped into three categories: research-intensive, teaching and research, and teaching, were analyzed using canonical multivariate methods based on their institutional and bibliometric data for a period spanning between 2012 and 2020. We found that the most important predictor for research productivity is the university category, associated with prestige. The institutional public budget has no significant impact on faculty research productivity; the amount and the impact of research are related to who is financed and not how much money from institutional financing is received. The teaching workload has a negative influence on research results, while the PhD students, analyzed separately, proved to be a significant predictor of all the scientific output indicators when considered as an absolute number. During the study period, there was a significant shift in the publication output from quantity (number of articles) towards quality—articles in highly cited journals, and this trend accelerated in the last two years. The process of universities' classification using research output is verified and tested, proving that it is an ongoing, highly variable process with continuously shifting demands. Although our research findings are specific to the Romanian context, many of them may contribute to a better understanding of the institutional drivers of research productivity and can be replicated in other contexts.

This study investigates the impact of remote workplace factors on employees’ social and technical self-assessed performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact of the variables belonging to the employee’s profile, organizational environment, and work-life balance categories on social and technical performance were analyzed, based on a survey of 801 Romanian employees, using ordinary least squares and quantile regression techniques. While the first method provided summary point estimates that calculated the average effect of the explanatory variables for the “average employee”, the second approach allowed us to focus on the effects explanatory variables have on the entire conditional distribution of the response variables, taking into account that this effect can be different for employees with different levels of performance. Job autonomy, engagement, communication skills, trust in co-workers, occupational self-efficacy, and family-work conflict, significantly influence both social and technical performance. PhD education and trust in management significantly influence social performance, while motivation, stress, the share of time spent in remote work, organizational commitment, children in the household, and household size, influence only technical performance.

The paper investigates experiences of employees and middle managers in relation to the transition from working from office to working from home in the context of COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. Three online focus groups were conducted to explore working experience in the new mode of work. The conclusions are multifaceted, covering four dimensions: time, spatial, social and technical, and point out how employees and middle managers understand the transition and what impact telework had on their job satisfaction and work productivity.

The international visibility of Romanian universities is relatively weak, even when compared with neighboring countries. This is explained by the historical heritage of the former communist regime and the lack of a clear vision for a post-communist strategic policy that could guide the research enterprise. This study examined whether the higher education reforms launched in 2011 had an effect on the research output, impact and international visibility of Romanian universities. The researchers used bibliometric data and university ranking data from ARWU, THE and QS Rankings. Trends in aggregate bibliometric indicators were analyzed for 38 universities as a whole, and by type of institution. Additionally, the Theil index was utilized to measure the degree of concentration of the research output across three institutional types. The findings reveal that there was significant growth in research output during the first years following the 2011 Education Law. However, this growth could not be sustained beyond 2014, except for Teaching & Research Universities and medical universities. This suggests that the reforms are producing the expected results at institutions that implemented and enforced new evaluation systems heavily oriented toward research.

This study gives an insight into the agriculture sector in Romania, over the last 10 years (2011-2020). The analysis draws on secondary data recorded in different databases and reports. An aggregate assessment of main agricultural macroeconomic indicators has been carried out at a wider scale. The country-specific analysis aims at identifying and evaluating main insights impacting the supply and demand side of agricultural or agriculture-related products and services and serves as a basis in quantifying the need for different interventions and mechanisms to support the agricultural sector. The target group consisted of agricultural holdings dealing with the primary production of agricultural products listed in Annex I of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the interest in new software tools to monitor the computer-based activities of employees working remotely (teleworking), and the demand for better analytics functionalities to be offered, focusing on employees’ performance and work-life balance. In this paper, we aim to analyze the habits of teleworking employees based on their interaction with the computer: how the employees are involved in different types of activities (actual work, recreation, documentation), and which are the most intensive periods. A conceptual framework for workforce analytics was developed for this purpose, together with tools and applications, that can provide useful information on different categories of activities where employees are involved. Knowledge generation is performed in four phases: collecting, processing, organizing, and analyzing the data to create valuable insights for the organization. Based on this framework, we developed a case study in an IT company, where two categories of employees, developers and software consultants, were monitored for 114 days, with 3.5 million events being generated and processed. The results showed different habits for consultants and developers, in terms of working activity structure, working schedule, inactivity time and interaction with the computer. Differences were also identified when we compared our results with previous research that monitored software developers working in-house: remote workers tend to organize their program for a longer period during the day, and spend less time on meetings but longer time for programming. On the other hand, both categories of employees (in-house and teleworkers) show highly fragmented work, switching windows after very short periods of activity, with a potential negative impact on productivity, progress on tasks, and quality of output. The research results can be used in future employee productivity studies when searching answers to a fundamental question for workforce analytics – why are some employees more productive than others?.