Problematyka badawcza funkcjonowania przedsiębiorstw przemysłowych

Abstract

Economic transformation processes in Poland, taking effect under the influence of advancing globalization, trigger extensive changes in the functioning of particular sectors of the national economy, industrial and service enterprises, and institutions. As a result, industrial structures are rebuilt, which is due to changes in functioning of industrial enterprises regarded as the basic elements of the spatial forms of industry concentration. These changes condition the participation of the national industrial enterprises in the global economic processes, and the integration of the Polish industry with the global industry, especially through forming organizational, financial, and technological bonds, and through entering the already-formed market networks of international corporations. Therefore, from the point of view of the analysis of the economic transformation process in Poland, and especially transformation of industrial structures, the research area of functioning of enterprises, which is the focus of this paper, seems an important issue.In the first part, the author makes an attempt at showing differences between approaches to research problems concerning functioning of enterprises in geographical and economic sciences, and points to the necessity that researchers pay special attention to the conditioning of changes in functioning of enterprises and the sources of financial means for the restructuring. Further, the author presents a modernized questionnaire investigating functioning of an industrial enterprise, outlines the criteria of selection of enterprises for the research, and discusses the range of analysis of changes in enterprises functioning basing on results achieved from empirical studies conducted in south-east Poland. The paper is concluded with a discussion of access to data, and data quality evaluation.These considerations appear to prove the validity and significance of the undertaken research problems concerning changes in enterprise functioning, to show advantages of a comprehensive approach to this problem area, which includes all important aspects of enterprise functioning, and to point out to the necessity of more extensive inclusion of economic issues in research work conducted in the field of industrial geography, as processes of change are not a goal, but a means that should lead to an increase in efficiency and competitiveness of an enterprise, expressed by economic indexes.