• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.267-285
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• 2004

Globalization has been the buzzword during the past couple of decades, embroiling humankind into the inescapable maelstrom of homogenization. Some critics identify the globalization process undergoing in the realms of politics, economy, culture and ecology with Americanization which entails Neoconservatives' scheme to stretch out the hegemony of the United States. The top-down transcontinental movement, however, deems to confront localization or a reasoned resistance from the local driven by the spiritual attachment to places and, in that sense, regional identity. What is needed to cope with this complex circumstance of glocalization is to be acquainted with beth the global sense of the local and the localized sense of the global at once. For this, it seems indispensible to do justice to area studies. As far as American studies are concerned, this research field has so far been tainted by an overdose of politics, economics, business administration, law and sociology. Regional analysis which constitutes the reason d'etre of the discipline of geography has remained marginal to the political economic mainstream. It is the mounting concerns about America and enhanced research caliber that raises the regional geographical studies of America on the right track. Particularly, a number of articles have been published since the mid-1990s owing to the combined efforts of practitioners, institutions and periodicals. It is expected that systematic training of new generation of American specialists, advance in research infrastructure, and generous funding will stimulate geographical investigation of America in the coming future.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.30
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• pp.239-273
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• 2005

This study compares the Korean and U.S. media's coverage of the No Gun Ri massacre, analyzing their usages of sources in the stories and explaining by the perspective of media sociology why they differed in them. For the comparison with the AP's report, we selected only the reports of the Korean media which dealt with the incident itself. It was found that most of the Korean media utilized a very small number of sources, and that they relied on the victims alone. In contrast, the AP's sources were much more numerous drawn from both the victims and offenders. As a result, the Korean media failed to ensure the 'diversity of sources' and to illuminate the whole picture of the incident, although they had started to report it far earlier than the AP. From the depth interviews with the reporters, through the framework of media sociology, it was found first at the personal level, that the difference was brought about by the divergent news evaluation. It seemed that the Korean journalists regarded the incident with relatively lower news value than their U.S. counterparts. Next, at the intra-organizational level, it was conceded, neither did the Korean new media have so flexible news collecting system, nor so murk man-power and resource as the AP, which were required for the coverage of such an incident. The Korean media had not established the convention to utilize various sources with conflicting interests. Last, at the extra-organizational level, the Korean news media's coverage was still influenced by the self-censorship mechanism due to the ideologies of 'pro-Americanism' and 'anti-communism', even though the democratization of Korean society itself enabled the sensitive incident to be dealt with eventually by the media.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.253-275
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• 2022

Niklas Luhmann is one of the most contentious and difficult theorist in sociology but follow-up studies on his theory gradually increase for recent 10 years. The purpose of this study is to observe how follow-up studies use the difficult concepts of Luhmann. Unlike previous studies, this study adopted a keyword rather than an article as the unit of analysis because keywords are linguistic constructs that can make concepts observable. The study analyzed co-occurrence of keywords in 139 articles retrieved from social sciences category in Web of Science DB. The key findings were following: the most important keywords were the name of Luhmann(Niklas Luhmann) and theory(social systems); keywords were grouped into 4 clusters(social systems theory, systems theory, legal system and political system, the significant of Luhmann's theory from the viewpoint of the history of social theory); topic terms were systems theory, communication, Autopoiesis, risk, legal system, functional differentiation, environment, social theory, sociological theory, structural coupling, systems and evolution. The significance of the study is following: the study gives keywords as useful access point for beginners of Luhmann's theory; the study proves that content analysis by keywords network can be applied to trend analysis of difficult theoretical researches.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.147-175
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• 2005

Efforts to identify the public's perception of social welfare as an academic discipline have never been conducted in Korea since the establishment of social welfare department in 1947 at Ewha Womans University. Such efforts are very meaningful in identifying directions and tasks to strengthen Korean social welfare as well as in clarifying and promoting our understanding concerning status of the academic discipline. This study attempts to explore and describe the degree of the public's perception in Korea with analyzing data surveyed in 2004 by our interdisciplinary research team. This study develops and uses a questionnaire having a Likert scale format that is composed of 8 points and measures the public's perception in the following dimensions: (1) personal interests on academic discipline; (2) contribution of academic discipline; (3) prospect of academic discipline; (4) importance of academic discipline; (5) expertise of academic discipline; and (6) personal knowledge on academic discipline. To avoid social desirability and promote objectivity with comparative measurement, this study selects ten representative academic disciplines as follows: medicine; physics; biology; social welfare; economics; psychology; sociology; political science; library science; and communication & journalism. This study attempts to identify (1) the degree of the public's perception on ten academic disciplines; (2) the position of social welfare by comparing it with each academic discipline and by comparing mean of social welfare with overall mean of six social science disciplines in the six dimensions; (3) the differences in the public's perceptions of social welfare on six dimensions by the respondents' status factor(high school students, college and graduate students, and citizens) and gender factor by using MANCOVA, and (4) the differences in the public's perceptions of social welfare on six dimensions by major factor(social welfare, social science majors, and natural science majors) and gender factor of college and graduate school students by using MANCOVA. The results of data analysis are as follows: (1) while the 3,319 respondents gave relatively high rating on natural sciences in the dimensions of contribution and expertise, they did the same on social sciences in the dimensions of personal interests and personal knowledge; (2) in overall comparisons, while the 3,319 respondents gave relatively high rating on social welfare in the dimensions of contribution, prospect and importance, they gave the lowest rating on the expertise of social welfare; (3) in the comparisons with social science disciplines, while the 3,319 respondents gave relatively high rating on social welfare in the dimensions of contribution, prospect and importance, they gave the lowest rating on the expertise of social welfare; (4) when analyzing all the respondents, there were differences in the vector of personal interests, contribution, prospect, importance, expertise, and personal knowledge by status factor, gender factor, and interaction effect factor; and (5) when analyzing only the respondents in college and graduate schools, there were differences in the vector of personal interests, contribution, prospect, importance, expertise, and personal knowledge by only major factor and gender factor. The results provide empirical backgrounds for discussing current image, status and major characteristics of social welfare as a discipline in Korea. Indeed, this study provides new meaningful and thoughtful guide for further investigation on the topic. In addition, contributing to clarifying and broadening our understandings about the public's perception on social welfare in Korea, this study discusses the tasks for dealing with expertise issue that is the most vulnerable issue of Korean social welfare discipline and research directions to strengthen and promote social welfare discipline in Korea.