• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.513-528
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• 2002

This paper aims to explore the recent economic restructuring and regional disparity after the IMF crisis in Korea in terms of uneven regional development. The so-called IMF crisis brought about changing Korean society and economy greatly. Although the Korean economy has been almost completely recovered from the IMF crisis, some structural problems remain. In particular, regional disparity has been deepening in the process of economic restructuring for overcoming the IMF crisis. While the Seoul metropolitan area including Kyunggi province has recovered from the crisis relatively fast and industrial production in the area has been kept active, the productive activities of local areas such as Pusan, Taegu, Kwanju and Ulsan province have shrunk significantly. On the contrary, the economic situation of Taejun province is not so bad in comparison with other local areas. The recent deepening of regional disparity after the IMF crisis can be seen as a process of economic restructuring to overcome the crisis. However, it is necessary to point out that production system has already been gradually transformed from Fordism toward post-Fordism since the early 1990s. In this context I argue that the IMF crisis, as an accelerating trigger of such spatial reconfiguration, has deepen regional disparity.

• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.331-348
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• 2011

Recently, international society strongly concerns global green house effect. As a result each nation introduces green policy for their economy and sustainable development. The emissions of carbon dioxide come from various sources, such as ports and port activities. Especially, port is a logistics hub for shipping, road and railways. Therefore, successful reduction of emissions in the port may encourage other transportations to reduce emissions. Korea as developing country is excused from Annex I countries which committed themselves to reduce four greenhouse gases. However, Korea is going to be placed in Annex I countries in 2013. Korean economy is heavily dependent on international trade and especially, 99.8% of its international trade cargoes is transported through the ports. Therefore, Eco-port plays a very important role in future Korean sustainable development. By introducing the most advanced port pollution regulations, Japan has taken a immediate step for Eco-port policy. International trade is very significant in Korea as well as in Japan, both nations have similar industrial structure. Therefore, Korea should pay attention to Japanese Eco-port policy and activities. This paper examines Japanese Eco-port policy and its' implications in order for Korea to find the most efficient way to reduce the emissions as Korea should reduce greenhouse gas emissions in post kyoto system.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.211-227
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• 2023

Purpose In the contemporary landscape, marked by the enduring impact of COVID-19 and the recent disruptions stemming from the conflict in Ukraine, the purpose of this study is to navigate the era characterized by pervasive risk and uncertainty. Specifically, the study aims to dissect the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on digital transformation, exploring the factors influencing this process and considering the multifaceted dynamics at play. The focus extends to the post-COVID-19 landscape, scrutinizing the implications and meanings of digital transformation both before and after the pandemic. Additionally, the study delves into future digital trends, with particular attention to climate and environmental issues, emphasizing corporate responsibilities in averting crises similar to COVID-19. The overarching goal is to provide a holistic perspective, shedding light on both positive and negative facets of digital transformation, and advocating for regulatory enhancements and legal frameworks conducive to a balanced and resilient digital future. Design/methodology/approach This study employs a comprehensive approach to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on digital transformation. It considers various facets, such as smart devices reshaping daily routines, transformative changes in corporate ecosystems, and the adaptation of government institutions to the digital era within the broader context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The analysis extends to the post-COVID-19 landscape, examining the implications and meanings of digital transformation. Future digital trends, especially those related to climate and environmental issues, are prognosticated. The methodology involves a proactive exploration of challenges associated with digital transformation, aiming to advocate for regulatory enhancements and legal frameworks that contribute to a balanced and resilient digital future. Findings The findings of this study reveal that the digital economy has gained momentum, accelerated by the proliferation of non-face-to-face industries in response to social distancing imperatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital transformation, both preceding and succeeding the onset of the pandemic, has precipitated noteworthy shifts in various aspects of daily life. However, challenges persist, and the study highlights factors that either bolster or hinder the transformative process. In the post-COVID-19 era, corporate responsibilities in averting crises, particularly those resembling the pandemic, take center stage. The study emphasizes the need for a holistic perspective, acknowledging both positive and negative facets of digital transformation. Additionally, it calls for proactive measures, including regulatory enhancements and legal frameworks, to ensure a balanced and resilient digital future.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.125-135
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• 2016

It is well known that the encouraging startups play a major role for innovation in an economy. Thus, venture capital are indispensable for the growth of startups. The literature on investment performance of venture capital reveals that the investment strategies depend largely on the characteristics and capabilities of venture capital. Therefore, investment capability of venture capital is important. There are various investing roles that can be identified by venture capital when determining what kind of startup to invest in, whom to invest with, how to invest, how to post-investment management after investment, and so on. This research was conducted to understand the effect of investment capabilities of venture capital on investment performance. To do so, we surveyed 70 venture businesses in the Seoul and Gyeonggido region for an empirical analysis. The empirical results of this paper are summarized as follows. First, the financial performance of venture firms is influenced by the financial capacity of venture capitalists, and investment evaluation of venture capital. Second, the business performance of venture firms is influenced by the marketing support consulting of venture capital, and investment evaluation of venture capital.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.117-130
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• 2019

After Marx, the issues regarding human labour have been the alienation towards production means and the distributive justice. Fourth industrial revolution and development of AI(Artificial Intelligence) opened the possibility of a independent production and economy system absolutely excluding against human nature and labour. Using robots and AI will deepen demarcation between living things and one not having life, separating the intelligence from the consciousness. At present, so called pre-stage of post human, seeking interests for life, new social relationship and new community will be increased as well. We can understand that interests for small community, self-sufficiency, dailiness, food and body in this context is increasing too. Representative trend towards this cultural phenomena is called as the 'Kinfolk culture.' Work-life balance, 'Aucalme', 'Hygge', 'So-Hwak-Haeng'(a small but reliable happiness) are the similar culture trends as. Vital capitalism, presented by O-Yong Lee, seeks focusing onto living things principles, e.g. 'topophilia', 'neophilia', and 'biophilia' as the dynamics looking for the history substructure, not class struggle and conflicts. He also argues the 'Vital Capitalism' be regarded as a new methodology to anticipate a social system after post human era. G. Deleuze said "arts is another expression method for existential philosophy. It gives a vitality onto philosophy and gives a role to letting abstract concept into definite image." We can find a lot cases arts' imagination overcomes critical point of scientific prediction power in the future prediction. This paper reviews ideas and issues of 'vital capitalism' in detail and explorers imaginating initial ideas of vital capitalism in the film 'Little Forest.'

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.137-165
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• 1994

Structural adjustment of industry (or industrial restructuring) seems to be inherent in the process of capitalist economic development, which tends to be proceeded with shifts from one stage to another in order to overcome structural crises generated in each stage. The structural adjustment of industry is necessarily accompanied with regional restructuring, since it is not only projected on spece, but also mediated by space. Such a restructuring necessitates industrial and uneven regional devlopment through which capital can seek excessive profits over the rate of socio-spatial average. The industrial restructuring and uneven regional development in the 1980s in Korea can be seen as a process in which capital attempted with a strong support of the govenment to overcome the crises in the end of 1970s and hence to go on rapid economic growth. In this process, capital, especially monopoly capital concentrated into few conglomerates, pursued both extensive expansion and intensive development of industry simultaneously. In results, the Korean economy could eliminate some of peripheral characters and maturate the Fordist accumulation system. The extensive expansion of the Korean industry in the 1980s was stimulated mainly through the enlargement and adjustment of investment for equipment facilities which was planned to exclude or rationalize traditional light industries on some places, and to continue rapid growth of key heavy-chemical industries, especially of fabricated metal industry, on other places. In this process, keeping mainly the existing developmental axis which polarized the Seoul Metroplitan region and the Southeast region in Korea, the enhancing spatial mobiiity of capital and the further differentiating division of labour enforced a tendency of concentration of all types of industry in the Seoul Metropolitan region, and at the same time provoked the diffusion of some industries over Jeolla and Chungchong regions in a considerable extent. The intensive development of industriai structure in the 1980s was pursued through the strategic encouragement of subcontracting small firms mainly which produced assembling components, the technical enhancement and factory (semi-) automation, and the enrichment of service industries for estate management, finance, distribution and retailing which supported and complemented the production of goods. In this process, enabling capital to extend and elaborate its domination over space through the reorganization of regulating systems, the Fordist division of labour generated a socio-spatial hierarchy in the nation-wide scale that characterized: the Seoul Metropolitan region as an overmaturated (or overarching) Fordist region performing the conceptive functions of management, research and development, in which all types of industry (including service industries) tended to be reconcentrated; Kyungsang region as a maturated Fordist region with excutive branches of large conglomerates and with subcontracting firms around them which produced standardized products through the automized production processes in secialized Fordist industries or rationalized traditional industries; and Jeolla and Chungchong regions as newly devloping Fordist regions with newly migrated branches and some subcontracting small firms-in relatively older Fordist industries or partly rationalized traditional industries. From these analyses, it can be argued that the structural adjustment of the Korean industry in the 1980s, which had carried out both through the extensive expansion and the intensive deveiopment, strengthened further uneven regional development process, even though it appears to have reduced apparently the economic and regional disparity by balancing numerically large and small firms and by extending the Fordist industrial space nation-wideiy. And it seems more persuasive to see that the Korean industrial structure in the 1980s maturated the Fordist system of accumulation, but not yet transformed towards the post-Fordist (or the so-called flexible) accumulation system, even though the Korean economy in the 1990s seems to be under a pressure of restructuring towards the latter system.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.17-34
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• 2001

This paper is to analyze how firms in a large firm-led industrial city have carried out the restructuring in the face of radical shifts, with focus on the strategy and the restructuring of firms in Ulsan, a typical industrial district in Korea that is specialized in heavy & chemical industry. It has been well known that the local economy has been led by a small number of large firms, including affiliates of chaebol, and its industrial structure has also been characterised as a clear dichotomy between large firms as a customer and small and medium-size firms as a supplier, which can be called not horizontal but vertical relations. It can identify some tendencies, however, that local companies have been rather dynamically changing in response to increasingly turbulent environment since the Asian crisis. Some are radical, but some incremental. These can be summarized in four distinctive but interlinked ways. First, more than half of local companies surveyed have attempted to change their production systems, mainly from the fordist mass production towards the flexible mass production, seeking both economies of scale and scope. Second, local firms have vigorously continued to reorganize the boundary of the production and the organization, by specializing products and focusing on the core competence in order to save costs and cope with radically changing customer demands in a flexible way. Third, there have been various strategies for the organizational innovation such as the introduction of team organization, the boundary blurring between the managerial and production workers and the intra-firm spin-offs, so as to improve managerial efficiency and competence in the use of internal labour market. Finally, they have tried to be more sensitive to the market and customers. These tendencies seem to be increasingly critical to sustain their competitiveness. To do so, they tend to focus increasingly not only on the competing via the product quality rather than through price, but also to seek to diversify the market and customer firms beyond national boundary.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.69 no.4
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• pp.41-65
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• 2017

This study aimed to examine the social transition, which is often metaphorized as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, within the context of social work practice and to explore measures to improve social work practice in such transition. Four social welfare researchers held seven discussions to predict the social changes in the near future centered on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and find the corresponding development strategies in social work practice; collective autobiography method was used to analyze the discussion. The analysis ascertained hyper connectivity, the advent and expansion of new communities, diversification and individualization, and the emergence of new criteria for the assessment of one's quality of life as the distinctive qualities of the near future. It was analyzed that humans and organic materials will be interconnected through spatial and temporal transcendence and that humans liberated from labor will seek for diverse communities while the number of atomized individual will increase simultaneously. Furthermore, the rise of new order of life accompanied by both the expansion of diversification and individualization and the ecological worldview brought forth by post materialistic trend was predicted. Meanwhile, the disengagement from macroscopic context, a biased inclination towards technique orientated professionalism, and individualistic social work practices without integrity were identified as the limitations of the current social work practice. This study presented three goals for social work practice to help it overcome its current shortcomings and correspond to the social changes: first, the rearrangement of practice knowledge, technique, and value so that it is based on humans and society, which are the essence of social practice work; second, the practice, such as sharing economy, that expands the individuals' boundaries of life to the community; three, the restoration of the desirability of professional social works by examining its special nature.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.421-437
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• 2009

China has transformed her strategies for economic development from exogenous development founded on foreign capitals to endogenous development based on enhancing technology innovation capabilities since 2000. More specifically, Chinese business activities have coupled with new institutional settings which enable them to facilitate advanced technology and management methods. As a result, the characteristics of the spatial economy in China are likely to transfer from export-led developmental space to technology-oriented developmental space. In this context, this paper aims to identify the characteristics of technology-oriented space by investigating intra-, inter- and extra-firms relations of Korean FDI firms in Shanghai, China. In terms of intra-firm relations, Korean FDI firms adopted strategies for maximizing business efficiency and effectiveness by transforming their personal networks into formal networks. In terms of inter-firm relations, the distinction of Korean FDI firms' networks has been found in accordance with firm size, industrial sectors, ways of investment etc. Finally, Korean FDI firms has formal networks resulted from institutional involvement, as well as informal (personal) networks based on guanxi (inter-personal relations) in extra-firm relations. Therefore, two types of processes affecting the networks and institutional legacies of the Soviet system can be identified. First is the interaction of institutions and restructuring of pre-existing networks. Second is the insulated institutions and endurance of preexisting networks. And these two governance types have created regional economies which are embedded and over-embedded.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.7
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• pp.7-36
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• 2009

This paper intends to examine the significance of the "Minjoong Misool(People's art)" of the 1980s emerged in Korea in its social, cultural, and art historical context. This paper also aims to provide an analysis of the meaning and form of the individual artist's works, which have been overlooked under the dominant discourse that has emphasized their political role as a collective group. In particular, this paper scrutinizes the work of "Critical Realists" by examining the way in which they perceived Korean society in the early 1980s and visualized their experiences of the period. The figurative art newly emerged in the early 1980s challenged the formalist Modernism, which was adopted into Korea and translated into monochrome paintings and the work of the conversative academicism of the 1970s. The figurative art encouraged a social communication and moreover it intended to criticize the conflicts in the political, economical, and social domains in Korea. The targets of its critique include the unavoidable results of the unprecedented development of economy, various social phenomena of the post-industrial society, and the growth of the commercialized kitsch culture. Along with Shin, Hak-chul's work that incorporates collage technique since the 1980s, the work of some members of "Reality and Utterance" and "Im- sul-nyun" exemplify their critical interests in disclosing the false dream of wealth and happiness by both referring to and drawing on the utopian fantasy manipulated and distributed by mass media and commercial advertisements. This paper pays particular attention to Nouvelle Figuration emerged in France and Europe during the 1960s, which is comparable to the new figurative art emerged in Korea during the 1980s. Nouvelle Figuration criticized the autonomy in art isolated itself from political and social reality after WWII, in particular the indifference of Informel and abstract art as well as American abstract art. Moreover it became rather politicized around May of 1968. Given that French Nouvelle Figuration was introduced in Korea in 1982 and made a significant contribution to the formation of figurative art in Korea, it should be noted that the new figurative art emerged in the 1980s in Korea cannot be categorized merely in relation to People's Art. This paper intends to critically redress the notion that People's art was formed in the particular political, economical, and cultural context of Korea independent of the contemporary artistic practices outside Korea. It will provide a critical examination and analysis of the content and form of the new figurative art, from which People's Art was germinated, in the global context.