The slandering of a firm’s products by competing firms poses significant threats to the victim firm, with the resulting damage often being as harmful as that from product-harm crises. In contrast to a true product-harm crisis, however, this disparagement is based on a false claim or fake news; thus, we call it a pseudo-product-harm crisis. Using a pseudo-product-harm crisis event that involved two competing firms, this research examines how consumer sentiments about the two firms evolved in response to the crisis. (...) Our analyses show that while both firms suffered, the damage to the offending firm was more detrimental, in terms of advertising effectiveness and negative news publicity, than that to the victim firm. Our study indicates that, even apart from ethical concerns, the false claim about the victim firm was not an effective business strategy to increase the offending firm’s performance. (shrink)

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but (...) not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

This book is an in-depth interpretation of Max Weber as a political theorist of civil society. On the one hand, it reads Weber's ideas from the perspective of modern political thought, rather than the modern social sciences; on the other, it offers a liberal assessment of this complex political thinker without attempting to apologize for his shortcomings. Through an alternative reading of Weber's religious, epistemological and political writings, the book shows Weber's concern with public citizenship in a modern mass democracy (...) and civil society as its cultivating ground. Kim argues Weber's political thought, thus recast, was deeply informed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and other German political thinkers and also reveals an affinity to the liberal-republican tradition best represented by Mill and Tocqueville. Kim has effectively resuscitated Weber as a political thinker for our time in which civic virtues and civil society have once again become one of the dominant issues. (shrink)

1. Sasang ŭi hyŏngsŏng -- 2. Saenggak kwa silch'ŏn -- 3. Ssial, saengmyŏng, p'yŏnghwa.

Ch'aek mŏri e -- 1. Ch'oe Han-gi ŭi sam kwa kŭ ŭi sidae -- 2. Silchŭng kwa siryong ŭi sirhakchŏk hangmun'gwan -- 3. Chujahak pip'an kwa Kihak ŭi hyŏngsŏng -- 4. Sŏyang kwahak kisul ŭi suyong kwa Kihakchŏk pyŏnyong -- 5. Insingnon ŭi chŏnhwan kwa kaekkwan insik ŭi pangbŏmnon -- 6. T'al Chujahakchŏk sayu ŭi chŏn'gae wa segye p'yŏnghwaron -- Kyŏllon : Chosŏn hugi Sirhak kwa Ch'oe Han-gi ŭi ch'ŏrhak.

1. Yŏhaeng e nasŏgi kkaji -- 2. Ch'ŏng cheguk ŭi sudo esŏ -- 3. Hangju se sŏnbi waŭi kyoyu -- 4. Chonmyŏng ŭisik kwa ujŏngnon -- 5. Sasangjŏk pyŏnhwa.