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A study on the Regulatory Environment of the French Distribution Industry and the Intermarche's Management strategies

  • Choi, In-Sik;Lee, Sang-Youn
    • The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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    • v.3 no.1
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    • pp.7-16
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    • 2012
  • Despite the enforcement of SSM control laws such as 'the Law of Developing the Distribution Industry (LDDI)' and 'the Law of Promoting Mutual Cooperation between Large and Small/medium Enterprises (LPMC)' stipulating the business adjustment system, the number of super-supermarkets (SSMs) has ever been expanding in Korea. In France, however, Super Centers are being regulated most strongly and directly in the whole Europe viewing that there is not a single SSM in Paris, which is emphasized to be the outcome from French government's regulation exerted on the opening of large scale retail stores. In France, the authority to approve store opening is deeply centralized and the store opening regulation is a socio-economic regulation driven by economic laws whereas EU strongly regulates the distribution industry. To control the French distribution industry, such seven laws and regulations as Commission départementale d'urbanisme commercial guidelines (CDLIC) (1969), the Royer Law (1973), the Doubin Law (1990), the Sapin Law (1993), the Raffarin Law (1996), solidarite et renouvellement urbains (SRU) (2000), and Loi de modernisation de l'économie (LME) (2009) have been promulgated one by one since the amendment of the Fontanet guidelines, through which commercial adjustment laws and regulations have been complemented and reinforced while regulatory measures have been taken. Even in the course of forming such strong regulatory laws, InterMarche, the largest supermarket chain in France, has been in existence as a global enterprise specialized in retail distribution with over 4,000 stores in Europe. InterMarche's business can be divided largely into two segments of food and non-food. As a supermarket chain, InterMarche's food segment has 2,300 stores in Europe and as a hard-discounter store chain in France, Netto has 420 stores. Restaumarch is a chain of traditional family restaurants and the steak house restaurant chain of Poivre Rouge has 4 restaurants currently. In addition, there are others like Ecomarche which is a supermarket chain for small and medium cities. In the non-food segment, the DIY and gardening chain of Bricomarche has a total of 620 stores in Europe. And the car-related chain of Roady has a total of 158 stores in Europe. There is the clothing chain of Veti as well. In view of InterMarche's management strategies, since its distribution strategy is to sell goods at cheap prices, buying goods cheap only is not enough. In other words, in order to sell goods cheap, it is all important to buy goods cheap, manage them cheap, systemize them cheap, and transport them cheap. In quality assurance, InterMarche has guaranteed the purchase safety for consumers by providing its own private brand products. InterMarche has 90 private brands of its own, thus being the retailer with the largest number of distributor brands in France. In view of its IT service strategy, InterMarche is utilizing a high performance IT system so as to obtainas much of the market information as possible and also to find out the best locations for opening stores. In its global expansion strategy of international alliance, InterMarche has established the ALDIS group together with the distribution enterprises of both Spain and Germany in order to expand its food purchase, whereas in the non-food segment, it has established the ARENA group in alliance with 11 international distribution enterprises. Such strategies of InterMarche have been intended to find out the consumer needs for both price and quality of goods and to secure the purchase and supply networks which are closely localized. It is necessary to cope promptly with the constantly changing circumstances through being unified with relevant regions and by providing diversified customer services as well. In view of the InterMarche's positive policy for promoting local partnerships as well as the assistance for enhancing the local economic structure, implications are existing for those retail distributors of our country.

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Cases of Ethical Violation in Research Publications: Through Editorial Decision Making Process (편집심사업무 관점에서 학술지 윤리강화를 위한 표절 검증사례)

  • Hwang, Hee-Joong;Lee, Jung-Wan;Kim, Dong-Ho;Shin, Dong-Jin;Kim, Byoung-Goo;Kim, Tae-Joong;Lee, Yong-Ki;Kim, Wan-Ki;Youn, Myoung-Kil
    • Journal of Distribution Science
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    • v.15 no.5
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    • pp.49-52
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    • 2017
  • Purpose - To improve and strengthen existing publication and research ethics, KODISA has identified and presented various cases which have violated publication and research ethics and principles in recent years. The editorial office of KODISA has been providing and continues to provide advice and feedback on publication ethics to researchers during peer review and editorial decision making process. Providing advice and feedback on publication ethics will ensure researchers to have an opportunity to correct their mistakes or make appropriate decisions and avoid any violations in research ethics. The purpose of this paper is to identify different cases of ethical violation in research and inform and educate researchers to avoid any violations in publication and research ethics. Furthermore, this article will demonstrate how KODISA journals identify and penalize ethical violations and strengthens its publication ethics and practices. Research design, data and methodology - This paper examines different types of ethical violation in publication and research ethics. The paper identifies and analyzes all ethical violations in research and combines them into five general categories. Those five general types of ethical violations are thoroughly examined and discussed. Results - Ethical violations of research occur in various forms at regular intervals; in other words, unethical researchers tend to commit different types of ethical violations repeatedly at same time. The five categories of ethical violation in research are as follows: (1) Arbitrary changes or additions in author(s) happen frequently in thesis/dissertation related publications. (2) Self plagiarism, submitting same work or mixture of previous works with or without using proper citations, also occurs frequently, but the most common type of plagiarism is changing the statistical results and using them to present as the results of the empirical analysis; (3) Translation plagiarism, another ethical violation in publication, is difficult to detect but occurs frequently; (4) Fabrication of data or statistical analysis also occurs frequently. KODISA requires authors to submit the results of the empirical analysis of the paper (the output of the statistical program) to prevent this type of ethical violation; (5) Mashup or aggregator plagiarism, submitting a mix of several different works with or without proper citations without alterations, is very difficult to detect, and KODISA journals consider this type of plagiarism as the worst ethical violation. Conclusions - There are some individual cases of ethical violation in research and publication that could not be included in the five categories presented throughout the paper. KODISA and its editorial office should continue to develop, revise, and strengthen their publication ethics, to learn and share different ways to detect any ethical violations in research and publication, to train and educate its editorial members and researchers, and to analyze and share different cases of ethical violations with the scholarly community.

Measuring the Economic Impact of Item Descriptions on Sales Performance (온라인 상품 판매 성과에 영향을 미치는 상품 소개글 효과 측정 기법)

  • Lee, Dongwon;Park, Sung-Hyuk;Moon, Songchun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.1-17
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    • 2012
  • Personalized smart devices such as smartphones and smart pads are widely used. Unlike traditional feature phones, theses smart devices allow users to choose a variety of functions, which support not only daily experiences but also business operations. Actually, there exist a huge number of applications accessible by smart device users in online and mobile application markets. Users can choose apps that fit their own tastes and needs, which is impossible for conventional phone users. With the increase in app demand, the tastes and needs of app users are becoming more diverse. To meet these requirements, numerous apps with diverse functions are being released on the market, which leads to fierce competition. Unlike offline markets, online markets have a limitation in that purchasing decisions should be made without experiencing the items. Therefore, online customers rely more on item-related information that can be seen on the item page in which online markets commonly provide details about each item. Customers can feel confident about the quality of an item through the online information and decide whether to purchase it. The same is true of online app markets. To win the sales competition against other apps that perform similar functions, app developers need to focus on writing app descriptions to attract the attention of customers. If we can measure the effect of app descriptions on sales without regard to the app's price and quality, app descriptions that facilitate the sale of apps can be identified. This study intends to provide such a quantitative result for app developers who want to promote the sales of their apps. For this purpose, we collected app details including the descriptions written in Korean from one of the largest app markets in Korea, and then extracted keywords from the descriptions. Next, the impact of the keywords on sales performance was measured through our econometric model. Through this analysis, we were able to analyze the impact of each keyword itself, apart from that of the design or quality. The keywords, comprised of the attribute and evaluation of each app, are extracted by a morpheme analyzer. Our model with the keywords as its input variables was established to analyze their impact on sales performance. A regression analysis was conducted for each category in which apps are included. This analysis was required because we found the keywords, which are emphasized in app descriptions, different category-by-category. The analysis conducted not only for free apps but also for paid apps showed which keywords have more impact on sales performance for each type of app. In the analysis of paid apps in the education category, keywords such as 'search+easy' and 'words+abundant' showed higher effectiveness. In the same category, free apps whose keywords emphasize the quality of apps showed higher sales performance. One interesting fact is that keywords describing not only the app but also the need for the app have asignificant impact. Language learning apps, regardless of whether they are sold free or paid, showed higher sales performance by including the keywords 'foreign language study+important'. This result shows that motivation for the purchase affected sales. While item reviews are widely researched in online markets, item descriptions are not very actively studied. In the case of the mobile app markets, newly introduced apps may not have many item reviews because of the low quantity sold. In such cases, item descriptions can be regarded more important when customers make a decision about purchasing items. This study is the first trial to quantitatively analyze the relationship between an item description and its impact on sales performance. The results show that our research framework successfully provides a list of the most effective sales key terms with the estimates of their effectiveness. Although this study is performed for a specified type of item (i.e., mobile apps), our model can be applied to almost all of the items traded in online markets.

The Effect of Meta-Features of Multiclass Datasets on the Performance of Classification Algorithms (다중 클래스 데이터셋의 메타특징이 판별 알고리즘의 성능에 미치는 영향 연구)

  • Kim, Jeonghun;Kim, Min Yong;Kwon, Ohbyung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.26 no.1
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    • pp.23-45
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    • 2020
  • Big data is creating in a wide variety of fields such as medical care, manufacturing, logistics, sales site, SNS, and the dataset characteristics are also diverse. In order to secure the competitiveness of companies, it is necessary to improve decision-making capacity using a classification algorithm. However, most of them do not have sufficient knowledge on what kind of classification algorithm is appropriate for a specific problem area. In other words, determining which classification algorithm is appropriate depending on the characteristics of the dataset was has been a task that required expertise and effort. This is because the relationship between the characteristics of datasets (called meta-features) and the performance of classification algorithms has not been fully understood. Moreover, there has been little research on meta-features reflecting the characteristics of multi-class. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to empirically analyze whether meta-features of multi-class datasets have a significant effect on the performance of classification algorithms. In this study, meta-features of multi-class datasets were identified into two factors, (the data structure and the data complexity,) and seven representative meta-features were selected. Among those, we included the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), originally a market concentration measurement index, in the meta-features to replace IR(Imbalanced Ratio). Also, we developed a new index called Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score into the meta-feature set. Among the UCI Machine Learning Repository data, six representative datasets (Balance Scale, PageBlocks, Car Evaluation, User Knowledge-Modeling, Wine Quality(red), Contraceptive Method Choice) were selected. The class of each dataset was classified by using the classification algorithms (KNN, Logistic Regression, Nave Bayes, Random Forest, and SVM) selected in the study. For each dataset, we applied 10-fold cross validation method. 10% to 100% oversampling method is applied for each fold and meta-features of the dataset is measured. The meta-features selected are HHI, Number of Classes, Number of Features, Entropy, Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score, Nonlinearity of Linear Classifier, Hub Score. F1-score was selected as the dependent variable. As a result, the results of this study showed that the six meta-features including Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score and HHI proposed in this study have a significant effect on the classification performance. (1) The meta-features HHI proposed in this study was significant in the classification performance. (2) The number of variables has a significant effect on the classification performance, unlike the number of classes, but it has a positive effect. (3) The number of classes has a negative effect on the performance of classification. (4) Entropy has a significant effect on the performance of classification. (5) The Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score also significantly affects the classification performance at a significant level of 0.01. (6) The nonlinearity of linear classifiers has a significant negative effect on classification performance. In addition, the results of the analysis by the classification algorithms were also consistent. In the regression analysis by classification algorithm, Naïve Bayes algorithm does not have a significant effect on the number of variables unlike other classification algorithms. This study has two theoretical contributions: (1) two new meta-features (HHI, Reverse ReLU Silhouette score) was proved to be significant. (2) The effects of data characteristics on the performance of classification were investigated using meta-features. The practical contribution points (1) can be utilized in the development of classification algorithm recommendation system according to the characteristics of datasets. (2) Many data scientists are often testing by adjusting the parameters of the algorithm to find the optimal algorithm for the situation because the characteristics of the data are different. In this process, excessive waste of resources occurs due to hardware, cost, time, and manpower. This study is expected to be useful for machine learning, data mining researchers, practitioners, and machine learning-based system developers. The composition of this study consists of introduction, related research, research model, experiment, conclusion and discussion.

A Study on the Applicability of Social Security Platform to Smart City (사회보장플랫폼과 스마트시티에의 적용가능성에 관한 연구)

  • Jang, Bong-Seok
    • Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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    • v.11 no.11
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    • pp.321-335
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    • 2020
  • Given that with the development of the 4th industry, interest and desire for smart cities are gradually increasing and related technologies are developed as a way to strengthen urban competitiveness by utilizing big data, information and communication technology, IoT, M2M, and AI, the purpose of this study is to find out how to achieve this goal on the premise of the idea of smart well fair city. In other words, the purpose is to devise a smart well-fair city in the care area, such as health care, medical care, and welfare, and see if it is feasible. With this recognition, the paper aimed to review the concept and scope of smart city, the discussions that have been made so far and the issues or limitations on its connection to social security and social welfare, and based on it, come up with the concept of welfare city. As a method of realizing the smart welfare city, the paper reviewed characteristics and features of a social security platform as well as the applicability of smart city, especially care services. Furthermore, the paper developed discussions on the standardization of the city in terms of political and institutional improvements, utilization of personal information and public data as well as ways of institutional improvement centering on social security information system. This paper highlights the importance of implementing the digitally based community care and smart welfare city that our society is seeking to achieve. With regard to the social security platform based on behavioral design and the 7 principles(6W1H method), the present paper has the limitation of dealing only with smart cities in the fields of healthcare, medicine, and welfare. Therefore, further studies are needed to investigate the effects of smart cities in other fields and to consider the application and utilization of technologies in various aspects and the corresponding impact on our society. It is expected that this paper will suggest the future course and vision not only for smart cities but also for the social security and welfare system and thereby make some contribution to improving the quality of people's lives through the requisite adjustments made in each relevant field.

A Study on Standardization of Supervision Cost by Investigating Supervision Workload in Cultural Heritage Repair Works (문화재수리공사의 감리업무량 조사를 통한 감리대가 기준 마련 연구)

  • Park, Hwan-Pyo;Han, Jae-Goo
    • Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.32-42
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    • 2013
  • The Korean Government introduced a cultural heritage supervision system in January 2010 to control quality and to prevent poor construction. However, cultural heritage related constructions that require supervision, a scope of supervision, supervision cost and placement of supervisors have not been standardized yet. For this reason, standards of supervision for repair works of cultural heritage that reflect the characteristics of small-scale repair works and restoration of cultural heritage are required. Accordingly, this study has suggested standards of supervision works and cost by analyzing the average construction period that is suitable for the characteristics of cultural heritage repair works. In other words, this study has suggested standards of full-time supervision costs by applying the fixed amount-added method (adding direct labor cost, direct expenses, overhead expenses, engineering fee, charges for additional works and VAT) which is the same as the method of calculating supervision costs for public construction projects because a supervisor has to work full time at a construction site to perform supervision if the project is a mid/large-scale cultural heritage repair work. Also, this study has suggested standards of part-time supervision costs for a small-scale cultural heritage repair work and the ways of supervising the construction projects by visiting the project site on important occasions. According to the result of the analysis by applying the forgoing standards of supervision costs for cultural heritage, a full-time supervision cost for cultural heritage repair works is approximately 98% compared to the construction supervision of a public construction project, and a part-time supervision is approximately 158% compared to architectural construction supervision. It is expected that the valuable cultural heritage of Korea will be preserved by controlling quality of cultural heritage repair works through the application of this study result - the standards of supervision costs for cultural heritage repair works - to an actual project.

The Effect of Mobile Advertising Platform through Big Data Analytics: Focusing on Advertising, and Media Characteristics (빅데이터 분석을 통한 모바일 광고플랫폼의 광고효과 연구: 광고특성, 매체특성을 중심으로)

  • Bae, Seong Deok;Park, Do-Hyung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.2
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    • pp.37-57
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    • 2018
  • With the spread of smart phones, interest in mobile media is on the increase as useful media recently. Mobile media is assessed as having differentiated advantages from existing media in that not only can they provide consumers with desired information anytime and anywhere but also real-time interaction is possible in them. So far, studies on mobile advertising were mostly researches analyzing satisfaction with, and acceptance of, mobile advertising based on survey, researches focusing on the factors affecting acceptance of mobile advertising messages and researches verifying the effect of mobile advertising on brand recall, advertising attitude and brand attitude through experiments. Most of the domestic mobile advertising studies related to advertisement effect and advertisement attitude have been conducted through experiments and surveys. The advertising effectiveness measure of the mobile ad used the attitude of the advertisement, purchase intention, etc. To date, there have been few studies on the effects of mobile advertising on actual advertising data to prove the characteristics of the advertising platform and to prove the relationship between the factors influencing the advertising effect and the factors. In order to explore advertising effect of mobile advertising platform currently commercialized, this study defined advertising characteristics and media characteristics from the perspective of advertiser, advertising platform and publisher and analyzed the influence of each characteristic on advertising effect. As the advertisement characteristics, we classified advertisement format classified by bar type and floating type, and advertisement material classified by image and text. We defined advertisement characteristics of advertisement platform as Hedonic and Utilitarian media characteristics. As a dependent variable, we use CTR, which is the ratio of response (click) to ad exposure. The theoretical background and the analysis of the mobile advertising business, the hypothesis that the advertisement effect is different according to the advertisement specification, the advertisement material, In the ad standard, bar ads are classified as static framing, Floating ads can be categorized as dynamic framing, and the hypothetical definition of floating advertisements, which are high-profile dynamic framing ads, is highly responsive. In advertising, images with high salience are defined to have higher ad response than text. In the media characteristics classified as practical / hedonic type, it is defined that the hedonic type media has a more relaxed tendency than the practical media, and there is a high possibility of receiving various information because there is no clear target. In addition, image material and hedonic media are defined to be highly effective in the interaction between advertisement specification and advertisement material, advertisement specifications and media characteristics, and advertisement material and media characteristics. As the result of regression analysis on each characteristic, material standard, which is a characteristic of mobile advertisement, and media characteristics separated into 'Hedonic' and 'Utilitarian' had significant influence on advertisement effect and mutual interaction effect was also confirmed. In the mobile advertising standard, the advertising effect of the floating advertisement is higher than that of the bar advertisement, Floating ads were more effective than text ads for image ads. In addition, it was confirmed that the advertising effect is higher in the practical media than the hedonic media. The research was carried out with the big data collected from the mobile advertising platform, and it was possible to grasp the advertising effect of the measure index standard which is used in the practical work which could not be grasped in the previous research. In other words, the study was conducted using the CTR, which is a measure of the effectiveness of the advertisement used in the online advertisement and the mobile advertisement, which are not dependent on the attitude of the ad, the attitude of the brand, and the purchase intention. This study suggests that CTR is used as a dependent variable of advertising effect based on actual data of mobile ad platform accumulated over a long period of time. The results of this study is expected to contribute to establishment of optimum advertisement strategy such as creation of advertising materials and planning of media which suit advertised products at the time of mobile advertisement.

An Influence of the Korean Wave on Chinese Tourism to South Korea (중국인의 방한관광에 대한 한류의 영향)

  • Choi, Kyung-Eun
    • Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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    • v.42 no.4
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    • pp.526-539
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    • 2007
  • The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the Korean Wave on Chinese tourism to South Korea through a behavioral analysis of Chinese tourists in the general group package tours. China suppressed the needs of the Chinese people's geographical movement and imposed restrictions on information about the outside world with the use of a policy of "closure" for a long time. But since reforms and open-door policies were introduced in China, especially in the context of relaxation of control policies over Chinese outbound tourism after the mid-1990's, more and more Chinese make trips abroad including visits to South Korea. In this situation, the recent Korean Wave(especially, drama/film) describes the Korean national image by forming a bridge between fiction and reality and plays a pivotal role in broadening or reconstructing the geographical imagination of the Chinese people who have been historically isolated from the outside world. Although Chinese have imagined the Korean nationscape on the basis of geopolitical or economic factors in the past, they have currently broadened or reconstructed their geographical imagination to include socio-cultural factors related closely to the Korean way of life due to the recent Korean Wave. This newly constructed geographical imagination led by the Korean Wave functions as an important pulling factor in Chinese destination choices, affecting Chinese tourists' motivation formation and the recommendation of main attractions. The more influential the Korean Wave is on their destination choice, the more the respondents select the cultural factors in both their motivation for tourism to South Korea and their recommendations of tourism attractions to other people. Through the analysis results of both satisfaction and intention to revisit, the more influential the Korean Wave is on their destination choice, the higher is the degree of both satisfaction and intention to revisit. In other words, although Chinese tourism to South Korea is chiefly in the general group package tours, Chinese tourists who are influenced by Korean Wave on their destination choice have more attachment to(or affection for) Korea as a tourism destination. This result suggests that the Korean Wave affects qualitative change - that is, change of attitude - as well as quantitative change in Chinese demand for tourism to South Korea.

Efficient Utilization of Private Resources for the National Defense - Focused on maintenance, supply, transportation, training & education - (국방분야 민간자원의 효율적 활용방안 - 정비, 보급, 수송, 교육훈련분야를 중심으로 -)

  • Park, Kyun-Yong
    • Journal of National Security and Military Science
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    • s.9
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    • pp.313-340
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    • 2011
  • The National Defense Reformation bill of "National Defense Reformation 2020" which have been constantly disputed and reformed by the government went through various levels of complementary measures after the North Korean sinking on the Republic of Korea (ROK) Naval Vessel "Cheonan". The final outcome of this reform is also known as the 307 Plan and this was announced on the 8th March. The reformed National Defense Reformation is to reduce the number of units and military personnel under the military structure reformation. However, in order for us to undertake successful National Defense Reformation, the use of privatized civilian resources are essential. Therefore according to this theory, the ROK Ministry of National Defense (MND) have selected the usage of privatized resources as one of the main core agenda for the National Defense Reformation management procedures, and under this agenda the MND plans to further expand the usage of private Especially the MND plans to minimize the personnel resources applied in non-combat areas and in turn use these supplemented personnel with optimization. In order to do this, the MND have initiated necessary appropriate analysis over the whole national defense section by understanding various projects and acquisition requests required by each militaries and civilian research institutions. However for efficient management of privatized civilian resources, first of all, those possible efficient private resources which can achieve optimization will need to be identified, and secondly continuous systematic reinforcements will need to be made in private resource usage legislations. Furthermore, we would need to consider the possibility of labor disputes because of privatization expansion. Therefore, full legal and systematic complementary measures are required in all possible issue arising areas which can affect the combat readiness posture. There is another problem of huge increase in operational expenses as reduction of standby forces are only reducing the number of soldiers and filling these numbers with more cost expensive commissioned officers. However, to overcome this problem, we would need to reduce the number of positions available for active officers and fill these positions with military reserve personnel who previously had working experiences with the related positions (thereby guaranteeing active officers re-employment after completing active service). This would in tum maintain the standards of combat readiness posture and reduce necessary financial budgets which may newly arise. The area of maintenance, supply, transportation, training & education duties which are highly efficient when using privatized resources, will need to be transformed from military management based to civilian management based system. For maintenance, this can be processed by integrating National Maintenance Support System. In order for us to undertake this procedure, we would need to develop maintenance units which are possible to be privatized and this will in turn reduce the military personnel executing job duties, improve service quality and prevent duplicate investments etc. For supply area, we will need to establish Integrated Military Logistics Center in-connection with national and civilian logistics system. This will in turn reduce the logistics time frame as well as required personnel and equipments. In terms of transportation, we will need to further expand the renting and leasing system. This will need to be executed by integrating the National Defense Transportation Information System which will in turn reduce the required personnel and financial budgets. Finally for training and education, retired military personnel can be employed as training instructors and at the military academy, further expansion in the number of civilian professors can be employed in-connection with National Defense Reformation. In other words, more active privatized civilian resources will need to be managed and used for National Defense Reformation.

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An Empirical Study on How the Moderating Effects of Individual Cultural Characteristics towards a Specific Target Affects User Experience: Based on the Survey Results of Four Types of Digital Device Users in the US, Germany, and Russia (특정 대상에 대한 개인 수준의 문화적 성향이 사용자 경험에 미치는 조절효과에 대한 실증적 연구: 미국, 독일, 러시아의 4개 디지털 기기 사용자를 대상으로)

  • Lee, In-Seong;Choi, Gi-Woong;Kim, So-Lyung;Lee, Ki-Ho;Kim, Jin-Woo
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.19 no.1
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    • pp.113-145
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    • 2009
  • Recently, due to the globalization of the IT(Information Technology) market, devices and systems designed in one country are used in other countries as well. This phenomenon is becoming the key factor for increased interest on cross-cultural, or cross-national, research within the IT area. However, as the IT market is becoming bigger and more globalized, a great number of IT practitioners are having difficulty in designing and developing devices or systems which can provide optimal experience. This is because not only tangible factors such as language and a country's economic or industrial power affect the user experience of a certain device or system but also invisible and intangible factors as well. Among such invisible and intangible factors, the cultural characteristics of users from different countries may affect the user experience of certain devices or systems because cultural characteristics affect how they understand and interpret the devices or systems. In other words, when users evaluate the quality of overall user experience, the cultural characteristics of each user act as a perceptual lens that leads the user to focus on a certain elements of experience. Therefore, there is a need within the IT field to consider cultural characteristics when designing or developing certain devices or systems and plan a strategy for localization. In such an environment, existing IS studies identify the culture with the country, emphasize the importance of culture in a national level perspective, and hypothesize that users within the same country have same cultural characteristics. Under such assumptions, these studies focus on the moderating effects of cultural characteristics on a national level within a certain theoretical framework. This has already been suggested by cross-cultural studies conducted by scholars such as Hofstede(1980) in providing numerical research results and measurement items for cultural characteristics and using such results or items as they increase the efficiency of studies. However, such national level culture has its limitations in forecasting and explaining individual-level behaviors such as voluntary device or system usage. This is because individual cultural characteristics are the outcome of not only the national culture but also the culture of a race, company, local area, family, and other groups that are formulated through interaction within the group. Therefore, national or nationally dominant cultural characteristics may have its limitations in forecasting and explaining the cultural characteristics of an individual. Moreover, past studies in psychology suggest a possibility that there exist different cultural characteristics within a single individual depending on the subject being measured or its context. For example, in relation to individual vs. collective characteristics, which is one of the major cultural characteristics, an individual may show collectivistic characteristics when he or she is with family or friends but show individualistic characteristics in his or her workplace. Therefore, this study acknowledged such limitations of past studies and conducted a research within the framework of 'theoretically integrated model of user satisfaction and emotional attachment', which was developed through a former study, on how the effects of different experience elements on emotional attachment or user satisfaction are differentiated depending on the individual cultural characteristics related to a system or device usage. In order to do this, this study hypothesized the moderating effects of four cultural dimensions (uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs, collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, and power distance) as suggested by Hofstede(1980) within the theoretically integrated model of emotional attachment and user satisfaction. Statistical tests were then implemented on these moderating effects through conducting surveys with users of four digital devices (mobile phone, MP3 player, LCD TV, and refrigerator) in three countries (US, Germany, and Russia). In order to explain and forecast the behavior of personal device or system users, individual cultural characteristics must be measured, and depending on the target device or system, measurements must be measured independently. Through this suggestion, this study hopes to provide new and useful perspectives for future IS research.