Tourism in the natural environment grows significantly and in many tropical countries it becomesthe important earning of the nations. Nevertheless, tourism impact to environment and cultural values has become the threats to the sustainability and competitiveness of such industry. Therefore, the appropriate planning and management of tourism destination sites where environmentally and culturally fragile are needed in order to increase economic benefits, sustain local culture and conserve environment in balance. The aims of the paper are to examine tourism practices, to determine socio-cultural and natural resources, and to assess local people perception to cultural landscape and its future tourism development in order to formulate the appropriate strategies to achieve sustainable tourism. A case study was carried out at Tengger highland, Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park(BTSNP) East Java. Official documents were gathered and interviews with several key persons had conducted to determine recent status of tourism, resources capital and the existence of local people. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were carried out at Tenggerese villages to explore local people perspectives to tourism development, culture preservation, and cultural landscape conservation issues. It is followed by descriptive analysis of vegetation to assess the recent status of environments based on vegetation information. Our findings reveals that tourism grows significantly at BTSNP, and Tengger Caldera as spiritual and cultural sites for local people become the centre for tourism activities. The abundance cultural and natural resources are the significant capital for sustainable tourism. Tenggerese argues that tourism should be planned to provide benefits to local people, preserve tradition and able to conserve nature in order to ensure the living sustainability of Tenggerese. The overall result of the study provide general feature of recent status of the cultural and natural resources as well as positive society perception in order to establish a strategy for sustainable tourism in cultural landscape.
Purpose: The aim of this study was to analyze the trend of the literature reported in the Journal of Korean Gastric Cancer Association (JKGCA) and the Journal of Korean Surgical Society (JKSS) in order to suggest new directions for the future studies on gastric cancer. Materials and Methods: The papers published in the Journal of Korean Gastric Cancer Association (JKGCA) and the Journal of Korean Surgical Society (JKSS) between 2001 and 2008 were compared and summarized in terms of the following categories, retrospective study, prospective study, case report, biomolecular study, genetic study, tumor marker study, review article, and report. Results: For recent 8 years, while the number of review articles in JKSS had initially increased, gradually fallen down and recently increased again, only a few (only 6 publications) in JKGCA have been published. The number of case reports in JKSS has gradually increased and fallen down. On the other hand, a few of case reports (1~3 publications) has been annually published in JKSS. Uniquely, reports were published only in JKGCA with the noticeable increase during the period from 2004 to 2005. For retrospective studies, in JKGCA the number started off very high and decreased, and finally increased again (U-shaped), whereas it had a bell-shaped trend in JKSS. The number of prospective studies in JKGCA had a bell-shaped trend, but the one in JKSS continued to decrease. Few papers of molecular biologic study, tumor marker study and genetic study had been published in both journals. Conclusion: We concluded that the transition from retrospective studies to prospective studies as well as a comprehensive multi-disciplinary team management of a clinical research would represent a desirable strategy in gastric cancer research.
Franchising is one of the fastest growing types of business. It is already popular and well-known in the U.S., and has been growing in many other countries including Korea. Furthermore, many Korean franchising companies have expanded their business overseas actively. According to the data by the Ministry of Industry and Resource, 82 companies out of a sample of 500 franchising companies are already operating in many foreign countries and 48% of them have started their foreign business since 2006. This clearly indicates the fast growing current trend of foreign operation by Korean franchising companies. In spite of the fast growing trend of foreign expansion in the industry, academic research on internationalization of franchising companies is extremely difficult to find. Accordingly, academic research on the issue is necessary and urgent in Korea. Among the various research questions on internationalization of franchising business, this study intends to investigate the difference in organizational factors between the franchising companies doing foreign operation and those doing business only domestically. More specifically, this research has the following purposes. First, considering the lack of theoretical basis of previous studies, resource-based theory and agency theory are employed as the theoretical bases. Second, this study explains the difference in internationalization based on organizational factors such as company size, history and growth rate. Third, the five hypotheses regarding the difference in organizational factors are presented and tested empirically, which is the first attempt in the area of this topic. Finally, the study attempts to clarify the conflicting implications among theories regarding some organizational factos such as growth rate. As the theoretical background, resource-based theory and agency theory are discussed. According to resource-based theory, a firm can grow continuously when it has competence and resource, and also the ability to develop them. The competence and resource can include capital, human resource, management skill, market information, ability to manage risk, etc. Meanwhile, agency theory views the relationship between franchisor and franchisee as an agency relationship. In agency theory, bonding capability and monitoring capability are the two key factors which promote internationalization of franchising companies. Based on the two theories, a conceptual model is designed. The model consists of two groups of variables. One is organizational factors including size, history, growth rate, price bonding and geographic dispersion. The other is whether a franchising company is operating overseas or not. We developed the following five research hypotheses basically describing the relationship between organizational factors and internationalization of franchising companies. H1: The size of franchising companies operating overseas is larger than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H2: The history of franchising companies operating overseas is longer than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H3: The growth rate of franchising companies operating overseas is higher than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H4: The price bonding of franchising companies operating overseas is higher than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H5: The geographic dispersion of franchising companies operating overseas is wider than that of franchising companies operating domestically. Data for the analyses are obtained from 2005 Korea Franchise Survey data co-generated by Ministry of Industry and Resource, GS1 Korea, and Korea Franchise Association. Out of 2,804 population companies, 2,489 companies are excluded for various reasons and 315 companies are selected as the final sample. Prior to hypotheses tests, validity and reliability of the measures of size, history, growth rate and price bonding are examined for further analyses. Geographic dispersion is not validated since it is measured using nominal data. A series of independent sample T-tests is used to find out whether there exists any significant difference between the companies internationalized and those operating only domestically for each organizational factor. Among the five factors, size and geographic dispersion show significant difference, growth rate and price bonding do not reveal any difference and, finally, history factor shows conflicting results in the difference depending on how to measure it.