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This study investigates cultural influences on the way that the Internet is utilised. We specifically examine how online time is allocated between information searching and communication in two culturally distinct societies: South Korea and the United States. Based on the argument that personal communication in South Korea shows a higher level of contexting, which is not easily transmitted over the Internet, we hypothesise that Koreans spend relatively less time on online communication than Americans do. Our analyses of time-use data support this hypothesis. We find that the difference between the societies is not in the length of time spent on online communication, but the choice of the Internet as a communication medium. Koreans are less likely to view the Internet as a communication medium than Americans, although they are equally active once involved in this activity.

In this study, we develop and evaluate a framework for investigating the relationship between firm performance and exit intentions—that is, when the termination of Business-to-Business (B2B) relati...

The nonprofit sector has become an arena of increased political contestation. Rather than being shaped passively by global trends and broader power relationships among social classes and organizations, the nonprofit sector and the larger civil society have increasingly become forces shaping social and political developments. To account for how these forces unfold in different countries, one needs to go beyond social origins theory, the power-distributional account, and sociological institutionalism and draw on concepts from historical institutionalism that explicitly consider how dynamic interactions between institutional forces and long-term historical changes shape patterns of political contestation. By examining the developmental trajectories of environmental NGOs in South Korea, this article explains how political contestation—embedded within institutional and historical processes of critical junctures and path dependence—may shape developmental trajectories of the nonprofit sector.

This paper examines two cases of collective resistance involving partnerships between local grassroots organisations and external environmental NGOs against government-sanctioned land use policies in South Korea. In both cases, the partnerships used apparently similar strategies of resistance in response to similar institutional pressures in similar physical circumstances, but the outcomes of the two collective movements differed. In the case of Daeji, the resistance movement succeeded by transforming its local cause into a broader environmental one, appealing to stakeholders in the larger society. Reinforced by goal congruence between the partnering organisations, the movement was able to gain regulative legitimacy through co-optation and influence strategies for normative and cognitive legitimacy from the larger society. In the case of Won-Dong, plagued by a lack of goal congruence between partnering organisations, the resistance movement failed to secure the necessary regulative legitimacy in the absence of normative and cognitive legitimacy.