In this dissertation, I interrogate the relationship of the smartphone as a mobile screen technology with time-consciousness demanded of the entrepreneurial self in South Korea since the 1997 financial crisis. Neoliberalism has been largely discussed in terms of the structural shift in economy by the S. Korean mass media. However, neoliberalism is not merely an economic shift, but an overhaul of society, whose impact is rehearsed and reinforced in culture. One of the key elements of this culture is the idealization of entrepreneurism. I explain the rise of entrepreneurship, especially self-improvement as life ethic in neoliberal S. Korea. I also discuss it in relation to the developmental democratic citizenship, meaning that democratization in the late 1980s has been co-opted by the national motto of S. Korea, “economy first” established under dictatorship in the 1970s. Within such neoliberal culture, the smartphone socializes users into relentlessly self-improving subjects, offering what I describe as the “attractions of participation.” I examine the perceptual relationships between the mobile screen and the entrepreneurial self, particularly set up by two specific apps: the Facebook app and a series of the tourist augmented reality apps called In My Hands launched by the S. Korean government to promote tourism in the country. The Facebook app, I suggest, promotes self-therapy that is built through a new mode of autobiographical narrative that joins together fragmented events, experiences, or thoughts in a user’s day with others. Self-therapy is also performed through incessant scrolling and checking. This mode of construction of self-identity is a response to and participates in neoliberal ethic of self-care in S. Korea under the hyper stimulated affective universe of contemporary capitalism. The tourist AR apps produce the “knowledge worker,” i.e., the self-motivated, self-educated and driven intellectual labor of the global gig economy. These apps encourage the user to seek information about heritage sites instantaneously and as if in a game, reconfiguring the user’s relation to the place. I also contrast these apps with contemporary arts practices that pose alternative temporalities in terms of a notion of community and history. I explore Heung-soon Im’s documentary film Factory Complex (2014) and Hyun-suk Seo’s performance Heterotopia (2011), for their surrealistic evocation of the disorientations and contradictions of the neoliberal turn in S. Korea. In conclusion, I suggest the user’s contingent and alternative relation to the mobile screen through individual practices, along with the example of the democratic movement from 2016 winter to 2017 spring in S. Korea. Overall this dissertation develops an understanding of the entrepreneurial individual in a neoliberal world. It elaborates on the contradictions in neoliberalism between individual freedom and the voluntary subjugation to capital by the increasing precarity of life. This dissertation offers an understanding of the neoliberal culture of self-improvement and its relation to the mobile screen in S. Korean context. In addition, this is a theoretical attempt to understand the visuality of the computerized screen. It raises a question computer user is indeed an emancipated spectator occupying multiple perspectives. Lastly, this dissertation provides an opportunity to reconsider a variety of media art practices highlighting interactivity and participation in terms of subjectivity and time-consciousness.

Education is a significant element for inclusive growth and sustainable development. In scholarship, understanding education has been fragmented due to conflicts between disciplines and methodologies. This thesis, consisting of three empirical essays, explores the impact of education for women’s employment and empowerment. As a context, this thesis has chosen South Korea as a newly industrialized but a non-Western originating economy during the mid-late twentieth century. All three essays adopt different theoretical frameworks and methodologies. The first essay adopts Capability Approach in order to understand the gendered translation of education into the labour market outcomes. In this essay, confidence is a societal conversion factor that individuals transform their resources into capabilities of labour market participation. Empirically, this essay shows that female public administration students in South Korea are less confident about entering labour market than their male counterparts, resulting in fewer capabilities of labour market participation. The second essay, comparing Korea with Singapore, which is another newly industrialized economy from the same period creates a historical and institutional basis to answer Korea’s much wider gender pay gap than the one of Singapore. This essay tests the hypothesis, previously built in the context of advanced economies, which states the negative association between gender pay gap and centrality of wage negotiation system in this comparative setting. The analysis of government documents and various sources demonstrates that Singapore with a narrow gender pay gap has a very centralized wage negotiation institution whereas Korea with a big gender pay gap has a fragmented negotiation. The third essay on Saemaul Women’s Club, a government-initiated nongovernmental organization, analyses the archival materials of memoirs of female Saemaul leaders in the rural areas for a bottom-up approach to women’s empowerment. Unlike the conventional scholarship dominated by the Western perspectives or a few international organizations, this case study shows the important role of the state in initiating a space for women to empower themselves on themselves. Ultimately, this emphasizes the contextual dependency of empowerment. The purpose of these three essays is to raise context as a way to understand the impact of education, stressing the diversity and dependency of contexts.

This study aims to understand the factors and dynamics that influenced a major social policy change. This is undertaken by unravelling the policymaking processes involved in the largest public pension scheme in Korea, the National Pension System (NPS). Changes to the NPS followed a very different direction to other expansionary welfare developments either in Korea or in similar East Asian welfare systems. This research set out to explain how and why this happened. This is examined via a case study approach with a particular focus on the role of policy actors. This provides an analysis of this single policy change across three time periods, which are characterised by different political and economic regimes: authoritarian rule; democratisation in the midst of a financial crisis; and finally a democracy in recovery from the financial crisis. Data was gained from 44 interviews with the actual policymakers and major policy actors involved, and was complemented by extensive archival data. The findings suggest that, first, although authoritarian governments in Korea may pursue social policy to harness economic development in order to legitimise their non-democratic rule, subtle yet crucial policy competition can still exist among key policy actors. Second, democratisation does not necessarily lead to a dominant view favouring welfare system expansion. Third, new major policy actors - strengthened by a democratic, centre-left government - may not always favour an expansive welfare system. The analysis suggests that, despite the emergence of an increased range and number of policy actors as the democracy matured, there was a marked continuity in policy development in the case of the NPS. Key policy actors pursued a reform in line with liberal economic policy that had been the dominant tendency during the authoritarian era. This suggests that the major mechanism contributing to this continuity was the role of a persistent and powerful epistemic policy community, members of which continued to influence policymaking throughout its development. The conclusion points to how incremental changes in the pension system led to the path dependency of the original policy ideas. We suggest that future research could apply a similar analytical approach to understanding change processes in various policy domains and to other East Asian welfare systems.

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O presente trabalho analisa o investimento externo direto das empresas sul-coreanas no mundo, considerando que o IED é resultado e alimenta o processo de concentração e centralização do capital. Abrangendo um período de 1968 a 2010, a pesquisa aponta para mudanças no papel do Estado, na proporção e no portfólio do investimento, e nas regiões para as quais se destinam os investimentos.. Buscou-se periodizar o fenômeno conforme as alterações da estrutura normativa que institucionaliza e autoriza dos investimentos, considerando também as mudanças macroeconômicas e políticas de cada período. / This dissertation examines the foreign direct investment of South Korean companies in the world, considering that FDI is the result and feeds the process of concentration and centralization of capital. Spanning a period from 1968 to 2010, the research points to changes in the role of the state, in proportion and portfolio investment, and regions for which the investments went. We tried to periodize the phenomenon according to the regulatory framework that institutionalizes and authorizes the investment, considering also the macroeconomic changes and policies of each period.

O presente trabalho analisa o investimento externo direto das empresas sul-coreanas no mundo, considerando que o IED é resultado e alimenta o processo de concentração e centralização do capital. Abrangendo um período de 1968 a 2010, a pesquisa aponta para mudanças no papel do Estado, na proporção e no portfólio do investimento, e nas regiões para as quais se destinam os investimentos.. Buscou-se periodizar o fenômeno conforme as alterações da estrutura normativa que institucionaliza e autoriza dos investimentos, considerando também as mudanças macroeconômicas e políticas de cada período. / This dissertation examines the foreign direct investment of South Korean companies in the world, considering that FDI is the result and feeds the process of concentration and centralization of capital. Spanning a period from 1968 to 2010, the research points to changes in the role of the state, in proportion and portfolio investment, and regions for which the investments went. We tried to periodize the phenomenon according to the regulatory framework that institutionalizes and authorizes the investment, considering also the macroeconomic changes and policies of each period.

This thesis explores how domestic factions and authoritarian regimes in Japan and Korea in the period from the 1850s to 1970s appropriated the concept of “modernity” to gain normative superiority over their competitors. The appropriating entity revised the concept of modernity to suit its own worldview. Across the case studies, the propaganda of modernity created a hierarchy that privileged those who are “more modern,” encouraged martial masculinity, and attached itself to existing domestic norms, such as ethno- nationalism. Under authoritarian regimes, modernity helped justify the mobilization of capital, manpower, and other critical resources in the name of nation-building or defense. Many factions and demagogues may have initially used the concept of modernity for domestic gains, but using this narrative later devolved into foreign conquests and imperialist expansion, for otherwise, their call for modernization would have become an empty promise in the eyes of the masses. This paper examines five cases along these dimensions, namely the rise of reformist samurais in feudal-era Japan, the failure of Joseon Korea’s ruling regime to adopt modernity in a timely manner, Imperial Japan’s colonial practices in Korea and Manchuria, the ideological divergences among factions in Colonial Korea, and a South Korean dictator’s attempts to gain legitimacy following a coup d’etat. Each case follows how domestic factions or individuals were motivated by an inferiority complex and how they produced their own version of modernity that favored their ascendance.

This study focuses on “critical insiders” of Korean Protestantism in the twenty first century, namely those who are committed to their Protestant faiths yet are highly critical of the ways in which Protestant Christianity is taught, believed, and practiced in South Korea. Particular emphasis is given to the question of how they resist/challenge dominant institutions and popular beliefs – especially on religious authority and various moral and monetary implications of such beliefs – as well as alternative visions they offer, through media. Scholars today acknowledge the centrality of media in various religious practices. I show that the role of media is no less important for religious critical insiders, albeit in somewhat different ways; in the South Korean case, I argue that they resist dominant voices by multi-mediatizing theology. Simply put, multi-mediatizing theology is making religiously normative (i.e. theological) discourses available through multiple outlets and voices and rendering informed theological judgments dependent upon such plurality and diversity of mediated sources. I analyze Korean Protestant critical insiders’ various media movements to illustrate this point and also to explore some ramifications of this kind of resistance taking place in the South Korean context. I also incorporate into my analyses the interviews I conducted with key individuals involved in the production of two Protestant TV shows that attempted at consolidating critical insider voices. I conclude with a theoretical and theological reflection upon the media/communication aspect of the entire phenomenon of Korean Protestantism and critical insiders.

This bachelor thesis aims to estimate Sweden’s export potential towards South-Korea since initial data indicates that Sweden has from 1997 up until 2005 been exporting less to South-Korea when compared to, in general, OECD. Furthermore, South-Korea seems to be a low prioritized market for Swedish firms in the East-Asian region. As many before us, we have used a basic gravity model, including GDP and distance in kilometer has been used as explanatory variables for the observed trade value. The dummy variable land-locked, to estimate trade potential for 15 commodity groups. Sweden was set to be the exporting country, South-Korea the importing country together with all the other OECD members, which were used as points of reference. The outcome of the gravity regression shows that distance and the dummy variable landlocked (if a country does not have access to open water) have a very strong relationship to the observed export data. However, GDP was proven to have a very weak relationship to the observed export data thus making the estimation process of trade potential for all, except one, commodity group biased. The gravity model has been widely criticized for inflating export potential due to misspecification a problem that we experienced when running our regression. Thus, from this study no strong conclusions can be drawn concerning the trade potential from Sweden to South-Korea.

My dissertation examines discourses and practices that surrounded consumption and production of advertising in South Korea in the first decade of the 21st century. In its approach, my study breaks away from works that assume that advertising performs the same role universally and that local advertising industries should follow the uniform path of development, in terms of both creative content and industry structures. Treating advertising as an integral part of social reality, I embed my analysis in Korea's idiosyncratic social, cultural, political, and economic contexts to interrogate non-marketing functions of advertising. My dissertation investigates multiple projects that advertising mediates in contemporary South Korea, from challenging social norms and renegotiating cultural meanings, to contesting capitalist control over mass media and articulating fantasies of humanist capitalism. I explore how advertising consumers (including advertising censors) and advertising producers channel, shape, enable or block the flows of advertising messages and revenues. My conclusion is that, in South Korea, the marketing instrumentality of advertising is subordinated to the ethos of public interest, and both advertising consumers and producers strive for advertising that promotes humanist values and realizes democratic ideals, even if it jeopardizes the commercial interests of advertisers. Theoretically, this study builds on critical theory and anthropology of media while drawing on Korean Studies scholarship to grasp interconnections between the practices of advertising production and consumption, on the one hand, and, on the other, the modern entanglements of capitalism and democracy. Methodologically, I combine a discourse analysis of advertising-related public texts—popular advertising campaigns, responses to them in mass media and the blogosphere as well as the exhibits of the Advertising Museum in Seoul—with ethnographic fieldwork at two sites, an advertising agency and a quasi-government advertising review board, both in Seoul.