Sungkonghoe University

ABSTRACT As environmental, social, and governance (ESG) becomes central to corporate strategy, firms must navigate the tension between meeting stakeholder expectations and avoiding overinvestment. This study examines how interpretive uncertainty—arising from stakeholders' divergent cognitive frames—produces a nonlinear relationship between ESG performance and firm value. Using panel data from Korean listed firms, we demonstrate an inverted U–shaped relationship, with higher ESG investment eroding returns. To explain this effect and its mitigation, we integrate sensegiving theory and cultural context into ESG research. We argue that firms can reduce interpretive uncertainty through strategic sensegiving activities, thereby mitigating the diminishing returns for high ESG performance in empathy‐laden cultural contexts by shaping the amount and richness of ESG‐related information. Specifically, we show that advertising intensity and philanthropic giving positively moderate the inverted U–shaped relationship, allowing firms to sustain the benefits of higher ESG scores. By linking interpretive uncertainty and sensegiving, this study offers a nuanced perspective on managing ESG performance and firm value.

This paper is an attempt at reconsidering minjung theology (hereafter MT) from the perspective of labor. He has a view that minjung theology has been developed and changed as it has gone through different intellectual and social-historical phases in modern Korea. He suggests that there have been three stages in the development of MT: roughly 1970-1983 for the first-generation MT, which is the time of the Urban Industrial Mission, and 1983-1995 for the second-generation MT, when minjung churches was active, and 1995-the present for the third and fourth generations MT, when social intellectual situation changed significantly. The author reviews the development of MT focusing on the relationship between labor and theology. He suggests that history and society have been transformed by the work and power of the subjects. He further argues that the subjectivity of minjung is conditioned both by their class-relations and by discourses in the society, and that class and discourse must play a crucial role in making minjung theology relevant to the neo-liberal capitalist society. Lastly, this paper suggests that Korean society must strive for a society where three major elements of society, labor, capital, and state, are in dialectical and dialogical relation to build a sangsaeng (living together, mutual and common living) society.

Mobile streaming is increasingly viewed as a major advancement in the wireless industry, as it enables users to consume content without any time or space restrictions. Mobile TV serves as an excellent example of streaming, providing services for watching TV content on mobile devices. While previous studies have explored video-on-demand (VOD) purchasing factors in mobile TV, it is rare to find research examining differences based on users’ mobile TV usage types, such as subscribers and free users. Consequently, we investigated VOD purchase factors for 310 subscribers and 311 free mobile TV users. In other words, using 621 survey responses, we analyze the influence of personality traits, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and mobile-related factors on users’ VOD purchase intentions and behavior. Our findings indicate that mobile TV utilization, hedonic needs, and subjective norms are positively related to VOD purchases, and that neuroticism, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness positively impact mobile TV utilization. We also examine the relationships between the constructs within two sub-groups to highlight the differing perceptions and behavioral patterns of these groups regarding mobile TV utilization and VOD purchases. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed as well.

Drawings from an online ethnography class and a discussion of the impact on student experience.

Abstract Research thus far has presented inconsistent findings regarding the effect of multiculturalism on the integration of immigrant youth; however, few studies have focused on making sense of these inconsistencies and further developing research in this field. In the current study, we focus on the possibility that policy arrangements for social welfare may condition the effect of multiculturalism in different directions. Specifically, we hypothesize that the policy mix of generous welfare spending and strong multiculturalism may not aid in the acculturation of immigrant youth in the host country. Cross‐national multilevel data from 28,879 immigrant youth in 29 countries were analysed. The results indicate that immigrant youth show higher school engagement in countries with stronger institutionalised multiculturalism. However, this pattern varies depending on the social welfare policies of individual countries. When strong multiculturalism is combined with generous welfarism in a country, it does not positively affect the school engagement of immigrant youth. These findings align with our speculation that multiculturalism is likely to work better in liberal economies than in generous welfare states.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how foreign firms’ alliances and the characteristics of those alliances (ties to a host country and alliance portfolio diversity) influence firms’ survivability. Using data from 162 foreign firms that made IPOs in the U.S. financial market between 2000 and 2008, this study investigates how number of alliances, alliances with US firms, and alliance portfolio diversity post-IPO influenced the foreign the firms’ long-term survivability. Relying on the resource-based view, we hypothesized that number of alliances and alliances with US firms would have positive impact on survivability and that alliance portfolio diversity would have an inverse U-shaped relationship with survivability. The study finds that a greater number of alliances post-IPO has a positive impact on firm survivability, but ties with US firms do not have significant effect. Contrary to our expectation, the relationship between alliance portfolio diversity and survivability is U-shaped (not inverted). A moderately diverse alliance portfolio diminishes a firm’s survivability, but a high level of alliance portfolio diversity has a positive impact on the firm’s survivability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the relationship between the alliances of foreign firms and survivability post-IPO. This study sheds new light on the implications of alliance building by foreign firms.

Introduction: Chronic undernutrition and a homebound state are corelated and are both important components of frailty. However, whether social network intervention combined with protein supplementation is an effective strategy to prevent functional decline among frail older adults is unclear. Methods: 150 frail older adults participated in a 3-month, 3-armed, community-based clinical trial and were randomly assigned to one of 3 groups: high-protein supplementation (additional 27 g of protein/day), the Social Nutrition Program (additional 27 g of protein/day and social network intervention), or a control group. Those assigned to the Social Nutrition Program group received individual counseling from 1 dietitian and 1 social worker during 6 home visits and were encouraged to participate in 4 sessions of community-based cooking activities, the social kitchen program. Primary outcomes were changes in Physical Functioning (PF) and the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test and were assessed at 0 months (baseline), 1.5 months (interim), and 3, 6, and 9 months (postintervention). Results: Compared with the control group, participants in the Social Nutrition Program showed an average improvement of 2.2–3.0 s in the TUG test and this improvement persisted for 3 months after the end of the program (post hoc p ≤ 0.030). The Social Nutrition Program also increased PF by 1.3 points while the control group showed a 1.4 point reduction at the end of the program (post hoc p = 0.045). Improvement in PF and TUG results was primarily observed for the socially frail subgroup of older adults in the Social Nutrition Program group rather than the physically frail subgroup. Frequency of leaving home functioned as a mediator (p = 0.042) and explained 31.2% of the total effect of the Social Nutrition Program on PF change. Conclusion: Our results indicate that social network intervention combined with protein supplementation can improve both the magnitude and duration of functional status among frail older community-dwelling adults.

General object-detection methods based on deep learning have received considerable attention in the field of computer vision. However, when they are applied to vehicle detection (VD) in a straightforward manner to realize an intelligent vehicle (IV), a graphics processing unit (GPU) is required for their real-time implementation. The use of GPUs is unacceptable in commercial VD systems. A novel on-road VD method comprising the use of a multi-stage convolutional neural network (MSCNN) is proposed to solve this problem. In the MSCNN, the properties of the vehicles are exploited, and an efficient region proposal specialized for vehicles is developed. The proposed MSCNN comprises four stages: vehicle lower-boundary detection, vehicle upper-boundary detection, region proposal network (RPN), and vehicle classification. Effective anchor boxes are generated in the lower- and upper-boundary-detection stages with appropriate sizes for vehicles of all scales. The bounding box of the vehicle within the anchor box is determined in the RPN stage. In the last stage, the predicted bounding boxes are classified as vehicles or non-vehicles. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the KITTI, CrowdAI, and AUTTI datasets, and its advantages are demonstrated by comparing its performance with those presented in previous studies. The proposed MSCNN realizes an average precision (72.1%) on the KITTI dataset while running on a central processing unit (CPU).

PurposeThe purpose of the Korean Frailty and Aging Cohort Study (KFACS) is to initiate a nationwide, population-based prospective cohort study of older adults living in the community to assess their frailty status and explore transitions between frailty states over time in Korea.ParticipantsThe KFACS is a multicentre longitudinal study with the baseline survey conducted from May 2016 to November 2017. Each centre recruited participants using quota sampling stratified by age and sex. The number of participants recruited through 2 years of baseline study from 10 centres was 3014, with each site accounting for approximately 300 participants. The inclusion criteria were: having an age of 70–84 years, currently living in the community, having no plans to move out in the next 2 years, having no problems with communication and no prior dementia diagnosis.Findings to dateTo define physical frailty, the KFACS used a modified version of the Fried Frailty Phenotype (FFP) consisting of five components of frailty: unintended weight loss, weakness, self-reported exhaustion, slowness and low physical activity. In the baseline study of 2016–2017, 2907 of 3014 individuals fulfilled all five components of FFP. The results indicated that 7.8% of the participants (n=228) were frail, 47.0% (n=1366) were prefrail and 45.2% (n=1313) were robust. The prevalence of frailty increased with age in both sexes; in the group aged 70–74 years, 1.8% of men and 3.7% of women were frail, whereas in the 80–84 years age group, 14.9% of men and 16.7% of women were frail. Women tended to exhibit a higher prevalence of frailty than men in all age groups.Future plansThe KFACS plans to identify outcomes and risk factors associated with frailty by conducting a 10-year cohort study, with a follow-up every 2 years, using 3014 baseline participants.