• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.70
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• pp.165-188
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• 2015

This paper deals with the questions: Are media user's activities labour? Or rent? These questions have provoked a debate in the critical media studies and Marx's theory. But it is not a matter of choosing either labour or rent. Even if user's activities could contribute to valorization, it needs some mediating process. Media Platforms-Google, Facebook, etc.-play a key role, and have to employ other forms of labour. Labour in media platform produces some capital commodities. In view of media platform, Smythe's audience commodity can be considered as capital commodity. Assertion in this paper expected to provoke new debate on media platforms and its labourer.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.31-56
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• 2015

This study compares the relative effectiveness of private tutoring and self-directed learning on the formation of cognitive (academic achievement on Korean, math, and English) and noncognitive skills (friendship, self esteem, creative personality, and motivation) of primary and secondary school students in Seoul. The results show that private tutoring has positive but diminishing effects on cognitive skill formation with no effects on noncognitive skill formation, while self-directed learning has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skill formation.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.69
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• pp.71-110
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• 2015

Beyond the technological behaviorism-oriented notion of prosumers, the current study explores the question of digital creative labour of the youth in the interrelated context of post-capitalist crisis and neoliberal ethos of selfhood. This analysis is situated particularly in the social conflicts and struggles in Korea, where the problems related to the precarization of the younger generation have been increasingly aggravated (in the realm of embodied reality) whereas their digital activities have been highly expressive (in the realm of mediated reality). The contradictions embedded in the question of the labour of the youth are delineated in the respect of the subjectivities of young free labour, or 'digital creative labour' in proposed terms: the precarious young free labour in Korea is the compound of social fragmentation, economic polarization, expansion of cognitive and emotion labour, boom of hedonistic consumerism, economic-cultural celebration of creativity and self-entrepreneurship, technological saturation of digital media, subjective/collective affects around excitement and ambition but also of anxiety and fear. The ambivalence and complexity of the young free labour is converged at the emergence of homo-economicus (Michel Foucault) through the subjectivation of the social (con)fusion of post-capitalist crisis and neoliberal governmentality of selfhood.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.33-73
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• 2016

We examine the relationship between individual's personality trait and wage performance using administrative data collected by Korea Employment Information Service. We use Aptitude Test Battery and Five Factor Personality Inventory for individual's cognitive and noncognitive skill respectively. The results show that there are robust relationships between wages and conscientiousness, extraversion. The relationships between personality traits vary across gender. Additionally, this results imply that the return to schooling is higher for those with higher cognitive ability in early labor market.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.1-41
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• 2007

Since Korea experienced a 'jobless growth' in 2003, creating jobs in the service sector has been considered as a top priority employment agenda. However, despite high employment outcomes in services, labor productivity remains stagnant in the service sector in recent years. A great deal of concern has been raised regarding newly created service jobs. Critics say low productivity in the service sector will harm the engine of economic growth in our country. This paper investigates the side of the demand for quality of labor, namely, the demand for skills as one of the main source of low productivity in the service sector. To analyze the changes of skills demand, this paper suggests the concept of job-based skills instead of worker-based skills and presents the way of constructing measures of job-based skills. By means of common factor analysis using job information in the Korean Dictionary of Occupational Titles, I extract 4 direct measures of job-based skills, such as cognitive skills, physical skills, fine skills, interactive skills. These skill measures are used to explore and to test how the skill structure changed in the service sector during 2002-2006. Empirical Results show that whereas the goods sector makes progress toward upskilling being represented by increased cognitive elements and softenization of tasks, the service sector, although high-educated workers increased, exhibits trends of deskilling in the sense of job-based skills during 2002-2006 in Korea. The trend of deskilling however does not seem a general aspect in the overall service sector. Rather, it seems a compound process that high-skilled jobs are created, but, on the other hand low-skilled jobs requiring physical labor are produced at the same time.