• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.457-485
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• 2013

This study attempted to discover the dimensions of Korean culture, with the presumption that the cross-cultural studies(Hofstede, 1980, 1997; Schwartz, 1992, 1994; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1997; House et al., 2004) have limitation to explain non-western culture including Korean culture. Even though there are some Korean cultural studies, they used heuristic approaches applying the authors' experiences and intuitions. This study applied the Cultural Consensus Theory to overcome the previous studies' shortcomings and to discover the dimensions that can be empirically proved by data. In specific this study conducted in-depth interview, used content analysis, did frequency analysis, and applied pilesort technique, multidimensional scaling and network analysis. As a result, this study obtained five categories: public self-consciousness, group-focused orientation, affective human relations, hierarchical culture, and result-orientation. It is expected that these dimensions can be used as important variables that may explain Korean social phenomena.