O15 - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; MigrationReturn

Radovan Richta was a Czech academic, philosopher, sociologist, prognostic, and head of an interdisciplinary research team. He specialised in the issues of the scientific and technological revolution and its social and human contexts. Both in the East and the West, he was famous for the work of Civilization on the Crossroad, which in many ways surpassed its time. Richta (and his team of scientists) may perhaps be considered the predecessors of the Roman Club. His link is highly inspirational for the current reflection on the so-called fourth industrial revolution and civilizational milestones as well as system changes.

Most Business English instructors at the university level face a problem when dealing with Czech college students: an "information" loaded report, which is a result of the knowledge based educational system where the old "referat" still seems to prevail but has been replaced by a trendier term, called a "presentation," in a Power Point format. When faced with the "Anglo" presentation style, students often fall in despair mentioned above. Their prior experience of a "presentation" stands in sharp contrast to the foreign instructors' requirements and to the demands of the current workplace. The lack of students' awareness of and skills in preparing such presentations is alarming and, therefore, the need to teach this "survival" skill becomes even more critical. This paper reviews the findings of a mini-survey administered to the author's freshmen and sophomores with limited exposure to making presentations in English. The findings are then discussed in terms of the Czech teachers' understanding of discourse analysis and communicative competence as opposed to the Czech rhetorical tradition experienced so far by the students. Consequently, effective teaching strategies, which build on developmental psychology research, are suggested as possible ways to guide university students in successfully creating and delivering professional presentations.

The recent boom of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) is over. The impact of the financial crisis and the new scenarios for future development of European countries after overcoming it have formulated new requirements on the ICT sector all around the world. ICT seems to be one of the key factors for a competitive advantage within a country or a community of countries. This article offers a comparison of the development of the ICT sector in the Czech and Slovak Republics with a special accent on the human resources use in this sector and research and development expenditures. Indicators selected by the authors are compared between these two countries on the one hand and with the reality of the European Community -the average for EU 27 countries - on the other hand. Some aspects of ICT human factors are presented in this article as well as their impact on competitiveness of both the countries. The ICT effectiveness index and future possible development of the information society in these two countries are presented very briefly at the end of the paper.

Work culture has the potential to enhance managerial performance. The objective of the present study is to examine the dominant work culture prevalent in the two private sector manufacturing organizations X and Y and to study its impact on the contextual performance and motivation level of the employees at the middle management level. The statistical tools used to test the hypothesis were the mean, standard deviation, t-test, correlation, one-way ANOVA, and regression. The findings show that the technocratic culture has the strongest partial correlation or the purest relationship with role motivation. Through a regression analysis, the technocratic culture emerges as a strong predictor of motivation while the entrepreneurial culture as a strong predictor for performance. The findings imply that when individuals are satisfied with their roles and feel that their supervisor or leader provides them with support, their contextual performance is expected to increase.