Min Kim

Despite the prevailing discourses on the importance of top management ethical leadership, related theoretical and empirical developments are lacking. Drawing on institutional theory, we propose that top management ethical leadership contributes to organizational outcomes by promoting firm-level ethical and procedural justice climates. This theoretical framework was empirically tested using multi-source data obtained from 4,468 employees of 147 Korean companies from various industries. The firm-level analysis shows that top management ethical leadership significantly predicts ethical climate, which then results in procedural justice climate that fully mediates the effects of top management ethical leadership on two organizational outcomes, namely, firm-level organizational citizenship behavior and firm financial performance. The present study provides a plausible theoretical account and empirical validation of a mechanism through which top management ethical leadership enhances organizational performance

The purpose of the present study was to identify and categorize career motivations in highly educated married Korean women. Twenty five participants who are working were interviewed and asked why they continue their work despite various difficulties. Sixty-seven career persistence motivations were elicited and reliably organized into 6 categories: low interest in childcare and household labor, family-related motives, high need for achievement, financial problems/needs, self-actualization and job satisfaction, and positive perception of working women. This study is significant as it conceptualizes the motivation for career persistence as the major variable affecting highly educated married women’s decision to continue their careers and establishes the theoretical basis for future research.

The innovation of Alain Badiou’s theory of change, which has attracted a great amount of attention from scholars working in disciplines across humanities, social sciences, and art over the past two decades, cannot be appreciated independently of the account of situations prior to an event’s irruption, namely, the order of being that is conceived using modern set theory in his treatise on general ontology. Retracing the meticulous systematicity with which pre-evental situations are conceived in Being and Event, this paper offers a reconstruction of Badiou’s general ontology that points toward the potential therein for articulating an account of structures and situations that may be qualified as social.

Drawing inspiration from Alain Badiou’s philosophical project of thinking radical change and novelty, this paper raises the question of whether Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony provides an adequate conceptualization of social change. Laclau claims that the transition between old and new hegemonic formations constitutes a “radical break.” However, it shall be shown that Laclau’s claim apropos radical break is in tension with his elaboration of the conditions under which a particularity – including particular political projects or social orders – may become hegemonic. As a result, how a process of transformation is to be conceptually distinguished from a process of reproduction is left unclear within the hegemony theory.

No theory of social change can circumvent the task of specifying the process that transforms the existent order into a different order, and determining that which accounts for the difference between those two orders. This thesis examines whether the theories of social change found in the works of Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau succeed in fulfilling this task. Badiou contends that a political process transforms the situation in which it unfolds in so far as what it produces is a ‘truth’. Certain implications of the set-theoretical ontological discourse through which Badiou conceptualizes truths, however, prevents an unambiguous appraisal of their socially transformative character. Although Badiou stipulates that the transformative potential of a truth lies in its ‘generic’ universality, this universality becomes indistinguishable from particularity when its transformative effects are limited to a situation—but it is precisely the interplay between situations, in the plural, that is not adequately reflected in set-theoretical ontology. Whilst Laclau’s theory of hegemony can be interpreted as providing an account of this interplay between pluralities of situations, it has its own shortcoming: the transition between different social orders cannot be thought under hegemony theory as anything other than a transition wherein the to-come is conditioned by the present to an extent that is theoretically underdetermined, resulting in the blurring of the distinction between social transformation and social reproduction. The final part of this thesis explores the possibility of bringing together the Laclauian notion of the ‘simplification’ of the social space through hegemonic articulation and Badiou’s theorization of truth procedure, in an attempt to conceive the particular kind of situation in which a political process would potentially have far-reaching socially transformative consequences.

The demand for organ transplants, both globally and in South Korea, substantially exceeds the supply, a situation that might have been aggravated by the enactment of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Decision Act (LSTDA) in February 2018. This legislation may influence emergency medical procedures and the availability of organs from brain-dead donors. This study aimed to assess LSTDA’s impact, introduced in February 2018, on organ donation status in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients in a metropolitan city and identified related factors. We conducted a retrospective analysis of a regional cardiac arrest registry. This study included patients aged 16 or older with cardiac arrest and a cerebral performance category (CPC) score of 5 from January 2015 to December 2022. The exclusion criteria were CPC scores of 1–4, patients under 16 years, and patients declared dead or transferred from emergency departments. Logistic regression analysis was used to analyse factors affecting organ donation. Of the 751 patients included in this study, 47 were organ donors, with a median age of 47 years. Before the LSTDA, there were 30 organ donations, which declined to 17 after its implementation. In the organ donation group, the causes of cardiac arrest included medical (34%), hanging (46.8%), and trauma (19.2%). The adjusted odds ratio for organ donation before the LSTDA implementation was 6.12 (95% CI 3.09–12.12), with non-medical aetiology as associated factors. The enactment of the LSTDA in 2018 in South Korea may be linked to reduced organ donations among patients with OHCA, underscoring the need to re-evaluate the medical and legal aspects of organ donation, especially considering end-of-life care decisions.

This paper attempts to provide a concise but systematic presentation of the discursive ontology of the social that underpins the thought of the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau. First articulated by Laclau and his collaborator Chantal Mouffe at the historical conjuncture of the late twentieth century that witnessed the disintegration of established leftist political visions and the rise of a plurality of new social movements, the post-structuralist discursive ontology on which Laclau bases his theorization of hegemony as the paradigm of politics is one that continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary post-foundational political thought, discourse analysis, and “left populist” political movements. This paper traces the fundamental claims of that ontology, paying special attention to Laclau’s theses apropos the limits of universality and impossibility of “fullness.” In the final third of this paper, the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s approach to the conceptualization of social change is employed as a foil to draw some key implications of Laclau’s elevation of “hegemony” as the universal form of the political for political thought and practice.