2009, Vol.36, No.2

Korean Social Science Journal 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.06

pISSN : 1225-0368 / eISSN : 2196-4424
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kssj

We applied De Jong’s (1995) theory across time using the corporations listed in Korea Exchange. Since the Korean economy rapidly embraced the Anglo-Saxon type of business regulations after the foreign exchange crisis around 1997, it provides unique opportunity to test De Jong’s theory across time. The results generally confirm the crucial predictions of the theory that the Anglo-Saxon type of business regulations prompt managers to lower the level of value added, and that the income to labor providers decreases. When the time-varying external variables, such as globalization, dissemination of IT and business cycle in Korea, are controlled, however, we failed to verify the rise in income to equity providers.

This paper attempts to analyze the characteristics and causes of the Korean ecological alternative movement and its theoretical, practical implications. The characteristics of ecological alternative movement are as follows. Its major proponents are conscientious pro-democracy activists and ecology-conscious farmers and housewives. It sets high value on the efforts to transcend capitalism, industrialism and the state-orientation and to form a cooperative and mutually beneficial community for peace and life. It also puts greater emphasis on the efforts to spread pro-environmental culture and life through face-to-face relationships. The reason why this movement has spread after the late 1990s is because the state-driven democracy faced its limitations amid the neo-liberal globalization, and civic groups failed to redress such problems. The ecological alternative movement was the result of the efforts of the community members to defend their own life in face of the structural failure of the dominant social paradigm.

The spatial distribution of social capital at the county scale for the United States (U.S.) is estimated and explained by media activity, socioeconomic characteristics, and levels of social capital in adjoining localities. A Geographic Information System is used to generate portraits of social capital, television use, newspaper use, and internet use at the county scale. A local indicator of spatial autocorrelation is also calculated to find regional clusters of social capital. High clusters of social capital are found in the Northeast and the Breadbasket states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, and the Dakota’s. Low value clusters of social capital are found in the South and de-industrialized Midwest. A thin diagonal band of counties, extending from southern Michigan to west Texas cleaves regional clusters of High-High (HH) and Low-Low (LL) social capital. Spatial lag regression results indicate that local social capital is positively predicted by newspaper and internet use, and negatively predicted by heavy television use, controlling for socioeconomic variables.