ISO 14001 is one of the best known and most common globally adopted environmental management system‐based standards under current sustainable development schemes. This paper investigates the impact ...of ISO 14001 on the level of pollutant emissions across manufacturing facilities in Korea. The level of pollutant emissions in 22 ISO 14001‐certified facilities in Korea is compared with that of 52 non‐certified ones. Through statistical analyses based on the Shapiro‐Wilk and Mann‐Whitney U tests, it is concluded that ISO 14001‐certified facilities and non‐certified facilities are not significantly different in terms of the level of pollutant emissions produced. These statistical results indicate that ISO 14001 may not contribute to the actual improvement of environmental performance in Korea.
Objectives: Using cases in the Korean workplace, this study preliminarily investigated whether ISO 45001-certified and non-certified workplaces differ in 4 aspects of occupational safety and health ...(OSH) management.Methods: Data were obtained from the 2021 Survey on the Status of Safety and Health in the Workplace in Korea. This study used a matched-pair analysis of certified and non-certified workplaces.Results: The results suggest that although ISO 45001-certified workplaces have a more safety-friendly internal institutional context than non-certified workplaces, there is no significant difference in the number of injuries and fatalities.Conclusions: The results indicate that ISO 45001-certified workplaces do not achieve better OSH performance than non-certified workplaces because ISO 45001 remains in the early stages of expansion, and certification does not require the achievement of OSH performance. A longitudinal analysis is needed to confirm the accurate outcomes of ISO 45001 certification.
Why do organizations respond differently to social policies? This is an important question because it gives us a clue as to why social progress is often slow even with successful legislation. We ...argue that HR professionals' conflicting roles within organizations affect modes of organizations' compliance with a law because HR professionals are expected to adjust legal pressure to business interests when translating external requirements into internal policies. How they manage this challenge depends on variation in the development of different dimensions of their professional agency: formalization and substantive empowerment. We demonstrate empirically this argument by taking the case of South Korea's parental leave policy. Using workplace-level data, we find that the presence of formal HR structures predicts that minimal compliance is more likely than is noncompliance, but is less likely than is maximal compliance, and that substantively empowered HR professionals contribute to making both compliance and maximal compliance more probable.
Alternative medicines attract attention because stroke is rarely expected to make a full recovery with the most advanced medical technology. Angelica gigas (AG) is a well-known herbal medicine as a ...neuroprotective agent. The present study introduced mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to identify for the advanced treatment of the cerebrovascular disease. The objective of this research is validation of the enhanced effects of multiple combined treatment of AG extract with MSCs on stroke through angiogenesis. Our results confirmed that AG extract with MSCs improved the neovascularization increasing expression of angiogenesis-regulated molecules. The changes of brain and the behavioral ability showed the increased effects of AG extract with MSCs. As a result, AG extract and MSCs may synergistically increase the therapeutic potential by enhancing neovascularization. This mixed approach provides a new experimental protocol of herbal medicine therapy for the treatment of a variety of diseases including stroke, trauma, and spinal cord injury.
This paper examines the adoption of ISO 14001, which is known as the most famous voluntary environmental program. The data of this paper pertain to Korean Throughout this paper, Korea refers to the ...Republic of Korea (South Korea) firms in manufacturing industries from 1996 to 2011. Event-history modeling to examine firms' adoption of ISO 14001 finds that both resource-based factors and institutional factors have influenced the diffusion of ISO 14001 in Korea. By exploring time-related effects, I also find that while resource-based factors are important in the early periods of the diffusion, institutional factors become important in the later periods of the diffusion. This confirms the findings of previous studies that a firm's motivation to adopt organizational policies varies according to different diffusion periods. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of what this study tells us about the institutional context of ISO 14001 in Korea and Asia more broadly.
This study uses a representative sample of 1,535 workplaces in Korea to examine the presence of a set of policy statements for diversity management. Hypotheses from neo-institutionalism are developed ...to predict the presence of a set of policy statements for diversity management across workplaces in Korea. A logistic regression model is used to test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that neo-institutional theory explains the presence of a set of policy statements for diversity management in Korea. In particular, employment laws in Korea are ambiguous, and the organizational connection to HR professionals strongly affects the presence of a set of policy statements for diversity management in Korea. This institutionalization process in Korea is similar to the US case.
The direct emission of circularly polarized (CP) light improves the efficiency of an organic light-emitting diode and characterizes the secondary structure of proteins. In most cases, CP light is ...generated from a luminescent layer containing chiral characteristics, thereby generating only one kind of CP light in an entire device. Here, we propose direct CP light emissions using a twisted achiral conjugate polymer without any chiral dopant as an emitting layer (EML). The twisted structure is induced in the mesogenic conjugate polymer due to its elasticity by applying different alignment directions to its upper and lower interfaces. Furthermore, we demonstrate the simultaneous emission of orthogonal CP light in a single luminescent device by patterning different alignment directions on the surfaces of the EML. The light source with multipolarization including the orthogonal CP states is applicable to many applications in biosensors and optical devices.
A modified interphase model was developed to improve the physical error of the conventional interphase model. To examine the superiority of the new model, a multiscale analysis was performed to ...investigate the effect of the agglomeration of silicon carbide (SiC) nanoparticles on the mechanical properties of epoxy-based nanocomposites with a continuum damage model. Both interphase models could be effectively employed to describe the negative effect of nanoparticle clustering on the nanocomposite stiffness. Meanwhile, only the modified model was able to provide results corresponding to experimental observations in the case of nanocomposite strength. It was concluded that the strength and damage parameters of the interphase zone should be different from those of the neat polymer for the realistic design of polymer nanocomposites with clusters.
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Economic sociology in Korea has been growing in earnest since the early 1990s. Scholars influenced by Anglo-American sociology began to criticize the logic of neoclassical economics, which ...presupposed an atomized independent actor who pursues utility maximization. They claim that social actors are embedded in various social relationships. As a result, social institutions and limited human rationality play an important role in shaping a decision for economic behavior. The scope of their research in Korea has extended to the study of the state, organization, and individual behaviors, and the research outputs have greatly contributed to the analysis of Korean society. The studies of economic sociology in Korea can be divided into three categories: state, organization, and individual. In this article, I examine how economic sociology has been developing recently in each area. To this end, I focus on the discussion in academic journals published since the late 1990s in Korean. (...)
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