BackgroundThis study aimed to identify the healthcare providers’ experience and perspectives toward end-of-life care decisions focusing on end-of-life discussion and physician’s order of life-sustaining treatment documentation in Korea which are major parts of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Act.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted using a questionnaire developed by the authors. A total of 474 subjects—94 attending physicians, 87 resident physicians, and 293 nurses—participated in the survey, and the data analysis was performed in terms of frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation using the (...) SPSS 24.0 program.ResultsStudy results showed that respondents were aware of terminal illness and physician’s order of life-sustaining treatment in Korea well enough except for some details. Physicians reported uncertainty in terminal state diagnosis and disease trajectory as the most challenging. Study participants regarded factors (related to relationships and communications) on the healthcare providers’ side as the major impediment to end-of-life discussion. Study respondents suggested that simplification of the process and more staff are required to facilitate end-of-life discussion and documentation.ConclusionBased on the study results, adequate education and training for better end-of-life discussion are required for future practice. Also, a simple and clear procedure for completing a physician’s order of life-sustaining treatment in Korea should be prepared and legal and ethical advice would be required. Since the enactment of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Act, several revisions already have been made including disease categories, thus continuous education to update and support clinicians is also called for. (shrink)

Students today are habitual users of digital technology. However, they do not examine the nature of their relationship with technology. Even though we are all enduring severe environmental crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, our students do not appear to see the interrelated connections between the environmental crisis and themselves. A case in point is that they have difficulty drawing a connection between environmental crises and their participation in industrial civilization. This is why it is necessary to consider technological literacy seriously (...) for our environmental education. This study seeks to investigate an alternative way to set up the relation of technology for the current environmental education by comparing the views of Heidegger and Latour on technology. Even though the question of the two thinkers starts from the same critics of the instrumentality of technology, their strategies to overcome it are quite different. While Heidegger suggests a human-centered relationship between humans and technology, Latour criticizes the limitation of this approach and maintains that more symmetrical relations with technology are needed as a form of a network between human and nonhuman actors. In this paper, I argue for the urgency of cultivating a sense of connection for our students’ technological literacy in this environmental crisis. For that purpose, I insist Latour’s advice for teachers and researchers to be considered more seriously to encourage students to take symmetrical relationship with technology in these aggravating environmental crises. (shrink)

The human relation to things in the world is at stake in the so-called post-humanist era where the distinction between human and non-human is blurred, as indicated in a term like ‘the nano-self’. How should we understand the nature of our relation to things in this era? Or how can we describe an educationally meaningful relation we as human agents can make in relation to things, artificial and natural, in the face of this technologically hybrid and ever-dehumanizing tendency of society? (...) Well-known for his actor-network theory, Bruno Latour, an influential materialist and philosopher of technology, says that ‘objects’ have agency as much as humans; so we need to be able to translate the language of things into the language of men or vice versa as a way of co-shaping the world we live in. What does this mean and how can we do so? In carefully examining his theory, the essay attempts to explore and reformulate his account of the mediating role of human agency to see if it can provide us with an educationally plausible post-humanist concept of human agency, which can lead us into an ecologically ethical and politically responsible approach to education in general, and science education in particular. (shrink)

Modern schooling in Korea, which was officially established by law in 1949, is well known for its function as an engine of economic success in modern Korea. Although this fact seems to be world-wid...

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena (...) as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection. (shrink)

Debt-ridden corporate growth and increased vulnerability was one of the causes of the 1997 financial crisis in Korea. Introduction of the outside director system has been the core part of the board reforms following the crisis. Our estimation using instruments obtained from a natural experiment illustrates that outside monitoring has improved capital structure of firms even when we control for the leverage regulation effect, enhanced compliance with leverage regulation and thus reduced business risks, and reduced excessive growth and excessive investment (...) more consistently for the top 10 largest chaebols than non-chaebol firms and smaller sized chaebol affiliates. Our results shed some light on why existing studies report the positive effect of outsiders on firm value and add value to existing agency theory by illustrating that the effect of improved governance on capital structure could be non-linear. (shrink)

Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a (...) lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies. (shrink)

Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centred not on essence but on absence. The fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but 'the way' (dao), which lacks the solidity and fixedness of essence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering. 'A Zen monk should be without (...) fixed abode, like the clouds, and without fixed support, like water', said the Japanese Zen master Dōgen. Drawing on this fundamental distinction between essence and absence, Byung-Chul Han explores the differences between Western and Far Eastern philosophy, aesthetics, architecture and art, shedding fresh light on a culture of absence that may at first sight appear strange and unfamiliar to those in the West whose ways of thinking have been shaped for centuries by the preoccupation with essence. (shrink)

Outside directors’ regular board meeting attendance is important in improving the effectiveness of a governance system. Such attendance is evidence of their commitment to the firm as key other players in monitoring and decision making. Using a unique dataset for Korean firms, and three-level random coefficients models, we find that, foreign outside directors, an independent appointment process, professional knowledge of business operations and accumulated firm-specific knowledge are important factors that affect outside directors’ attendance of board meetings. The results also confirm (...) that both outside directors’ personal characteristics and the social context are crucial in understanding their board meeting attendance. Further analysis shows that a positive corporate environment that supports the outside director system encourages outside directors’ attendance at board meetings. (shrink)