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Korea is a highly centralized country where most administrative functions are carried out by the central government in Seoul. Increasingly, however, local governments have been given greater autonomy in their operations. This chapter examines how the ideal values of political decentralization have interacted with the country’s local bureaucracy, which inherently has dark side in itself. The focus is on how local government employees have contributed, or responded, to the democratic change of their communities, particularly since the 1980s. At the outset, the experiences of Korea’s decentralization and local autonomy are briefly reviewed. It is then examined how the bureaucrats have played in the process of democratization in terms of three features: bureaucratic power, scope, and culture. Institutionalizing competitive local bureaucracy contributed to reduce the disparity between capital regions (Seoul and its surrounded area) and noncapital regions (locals). Empowering local bureaucracy to allow own localized decision-making process was the first move of Korean governance.

In this chapter, I discuss the development of the cannibal picking up from Jennifer Brown’s (2013) study, Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Brown (2013, p. 7) argued that the cannibal is a sign of ultimate difference who ‘reappears in various guises at times when popular culture needs to express real fears and anxieties’. I argue that the most recent version of the cannibal is gendered female and that this coincides with a postfeminist media culture. I explore how the cannibal is positioned as an ambiguous figure which questions both humanity and monstrosity. I argue that this is complicated by gendering it female as women have traditionally straddled the line between human and less-than human in popular culture. I discuss three films: 301/302 (Park, 1995), The Woman (Torino, Van Den Houten, & McKee, 2011) and Raw (De Forêts & Ducournau, 2016) and explore how they use incest, objectification and dehumanization as well as cannibalism to explore the ambiguities of postfeminist subjecthood. I will argue that by performing acts of cannibalism the female cannibals in these films reclaim their subjectivity both by objectifying others and by identifying with their victims. The cannibalism also presents the opportunity for female-oriented families through shared consumption which ironically embraces patriarchal ideals of feminine feeding roles and challenges the patriarchal basis of the family.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of competitive market environments on the firm’s decision to adopt green supply chain management (GSCM) practices, while checking to see if the firm’s commitment to particular types of GSCM practices improves its performance.

To confirm a positive link between the firm’s GSCM practices to its performance, the authors collected the data from 322 Korean firms via questionnaire surveys and then analyzed these data using the structural equation model.

Among various types of GSCM practices, green purchasing has the greatest impact on both manufacturing and marketing performances. Also, internal environmental management positively influenced both manufacturing and marketing performances, whereas cooperation with customers and reverse logistics had no significant impact on the firm’s manufacturing and marketing performances.

To provide a practical advice for firms which are hesitant to embrace green supply chain practices due to skeptical views about their true managerial benefits, this paper discerned more effective GSCM practices from less effective GSCM practices. In so doing, this paper is one of the few studies which pinpointed what types of specific GSCM practices are most effective in enhancing firm performance.

The aim of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of the “publicness” and “privateness” concepts in examining childcare policy reforms. Understanding them as having multiple facets, this paper challenges the way in which childcare-going-public is often simply assessed based on the coverage of publicly-funded childcare services. Instead, it highlights that the process should be more thoroughly examined by considering who pays for whom to provide childcare, where it takes place, how it is regulated, and what kinds of normative ideals it works towards.

The research design is two-fold. Firstly, it coins the concepts of “publicness” and “privateness” based on existing literature on welfare pluralism and public administration. It then unpacks the key facets constituting this conceptual twin within the childcare context, which are utilised to craft four models of childcare production. Secondly, this framework is analytically applied to explore 21st-century South Korea to track the changes and continuities in its childcare production models across four governments.

The analysis shows that while South Korea's childcare publicness increased in terms of funding, its privateness was bolstered in regard to the location of childcare, the way that publicly-funded childcare services were regulated and delivered, and the manner in which childcare was partially consolidated as a familial responsibility.

This paper proposes a new conceptual framework to analyse the complex and multi-layered process of how childcare goes public, which is analytically applied to a cross-governmental comparative study of South Korea.

The purpose of this paper is to, first, examine gender differences in response to the presence of diversity management and in the level of organizational commitment, second, to investigate the influence of diversity management practices on organizational commitment, and third, to examine the relationships among gender, diversity management, organizational commitment, and job performance in a more highly male-dominated culture.

Based on a review of the literature, this empirical study uses a survey and statistical analysis, including t-tests and regressions, to test the hypotheses.

The major findings are as follows: first, female workers reported a more favorable perception of diversity management practices than did male workers. However, there was no difference between female and male workers in organizational commitment. Second, diversity management was positively and significantly related to organizational commitment. Finally, the results show that gender was not related to in-role performance, while diversity management and organizational commitment were positively related to in-role performance.

The significance of this study lies in its investigation of the effect of diversity management on employees’ attitude and behavior and the gender differences in the perception of diversity management and organizational commitment in a highly male-dominated society. In addition, since Korean companies have become more performance oriented (House et al., 2004), finding the positive relationship between diversity management practices and job performance can also suggest one way for all organizations to increase their employees’ task performance for their continuous development.

This study aims to investigate the criteria to measure and manage a software project’s quality indicator elements needed to implement system integration in the Industry 4.0 era.

The standard software process model SPICE: a crucial part of the system integration software development process, is analyzed to explore how the factors of the SPICE model rate qualitatively on the quality scorecard (QSC). QSC is a qualitative performance measurement model based on the cost of quality (COQ) perspective. The SPICE model’s effectiveness is examined in terms of system integration (SI) quality, and factors for improving this quality are determined.

The authors proposed future directions for improving SI management. The seven SPICE process groups were analyzed comparatively by matching them to the QSC. The SPICE model was found to achieve 63% with the required factors in QSC. Also, the uncommitted items indicated need to be considered for additional management in SI quality.

Since SPICE is revised every five years, it is suggested from this study that diagnosing the assessment items from the COQ perspective using QSC is one strategy to quickly enhance the quality of SI management in this rapidly changing technology revolution.

This research is the first study of its kind, proposing a methodology for adapting quickly to the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s changes and showing how the standards have changed the SPICE model over time.

The purpose of this study is to examine similar and/or different perspectives on, and practices of online-learning interaction as projected by the participating educators who are from either Korea or the USA.

In this study, the authors analyzed how college instructors from two countries, Korea and the USA, consider the role of online-learning interaction in their students' learning by interviewing nine instructors from both countries. The authors examined the educators' responses using constructivism and Confucianism as the frame of reference.

The analysis showed that the US instructors tend to focus on learner-to-learner interaction, whereas Korean instructors emphasized teacher-to-learner interaction. Korean instructors perceived a gap between ideal and reality in integrating interaction as a part of online activities in the course.

This study focuses on a cross-national comparison of online-learning interaction between Korea and the USA. Thus, it will provide practical ideas for global or multicultural user experiences on online-learning courses.