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The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the efficiency and effectiveness of industrial policies by focusing on the peculiar experience of South Korea. It analyzes Korean structural change from a historical and empirical standpoint, highlighting industrial policy interventions involved in this process. The analysis presented offers important insights to inform the debate on the contemporary industrial policy, identifying specific elements and circumstances that can contribute to mitigate government failures and to improve the effectiveness of public action.

The paper adopts a historical and empirical perspective. Concerning the empirical analysis, a composite indicator to assess the process of structural change of economies is presented. This methodology provides annual rankings based on the different economic relevance of the manufacturing sectors over the period 1963–2012.

The paper shows that industrial policy has been extensively involved in South Korean structural development but public intervention interacted with several other factors, including gradual markets liberalization, education, societal and cultural characteristics and low level of income inequalities. As a result, economic development is conceived as systemic process, namely as the outcome of a balance in the roles played by government, markets and civil society. In this framework, government failures, as inability of the government to respond effectively and efficiently to the general interest of the society, are intimately inherent to the mechanisms that rule the relevant relationships within the system.

In the post-crisis debate, very little attention has been devoted in academic and political debate to the ways to mitigate government failures. By analyzing the historical and recent Korean experience with industrial policy, the paper addresses an issue insufficiently analyzed offering an innovative contribution.

China’s experience of industrial growth is noteworthy for several reasons, not least because it has made a massive use of selective industrial policies. The industrial development guidelines set by the Five-Year Plans are extensively based on the choice of “strategic” or “pillar” industries to be promoted and supported. What remains unclear is the way in which such industries are identified among many. The purpose of this paper is to propose a debate on how to improve the government choice of strategic sectors and suggests a methodology to make this choice more transparent and rigorous.

The methodology allows ranking the different industries according to their strategic importance in the Chinese economy. The authors employ an uncertainty analysis methodology to verify the robustness of the ranking.

The results point to a list of strategic sectors for China. Comparing the ranking of the strategic sectors to the list of strategic priorities described in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, we find that, by and large, the ranking coincides with the list of strategic sectors of the Chinese government.

The authors argue that improving the transparency and the rigor of the choice of pillar industries can be crucial for the Chinese government to maintain social legitimization in the transition to a “market” economy.

Very little is known about the choice of strategic sectors in China in the international literature. By addressing the debate on the choice of pillar industries in China, the paper discusses a topic scarcely studied offering a unique and original contribute.

The article explores the potential for self-employed personal trainers (SEPTs) to resist exploitation by gyms, with a focus on the attitudes of SEPTs towards trade unions and collective action.

This article is based on a multiple-method study with qualitative data drawn from participant observation and interviews and quantitative data from a questionnaire survey. The data were collected in 2018.

The potential for individual resistance to exploitation among SEPTs is limited. However, attitudes towards a collective response were largely positive, albeit there is certainly no consensus agreement on the value of trade unions. The logic of coopetition is applied to explain the issues on which trade unions might organize SEPTs.

The study suggests coopetition as an organizing logic for highly individualized self-employed workers in intense proximal competition with one another. However, the research presented in this article was undertaken with a unique group of solo self-employed workers. Further study is required to demonstrate the applicability of these findings.

The commercialization of work poses a threat to traditional employment and trade unions. It is crucial that trade unions represent the interests of all workers by focusing on workers who do not traditionally form the vanguard of its membership (e.g. dependent workers and the falsely self-employed). The study illustrates the way in which trade unions can organize micro-entrepreneurs.

Coopetitive representation whereby micro-entrepreneurs collaborate to resist exploitation while remaining independent has the potential to change the perspectives and values of entrepreneurs.

The article assesses the potential of organizing a highly individualized and competitive self-employed worker. Coopetitive representation is presented as distinct from other approaches to representation and as a means of trade union revitalization.

This paper aims to review past papers focused on understanding consumer-related topics in marketing and related interdisciplinary fields to demonstrate the applications of electroencephalogram (EEG) in consumer neuroscience.

In addition to the review of papers using EEG to study consumer cognitive processes, the authors also discuss relevant decisions and considerations in conducting event-related potential (ERP) studies. Further, a framework proposed by Plassmann et al. (2015) was used to discuss the applications of EEG in marketing research from papers reviewed.

This paper successfully used Plassmann et al.’s (2015) framework to discuss five applications of neuroscience to marketing research. A review of growing EEG studies in the field of marketing and other interdisciplinary fields reveals the advantages and potential of using EEG in combination with other methods. This calls for more research using such methods.

A technical overview of ERP-related terminology provides researchers with a background for understanding and reviewing ERP studies. A discussion of method-related considerations and decisions provides marketing researchers with an introduction to the method and refers readers to relevant literature.

The marketing industry has been quick to adopt cutting edge technology, including EEG, to understand and predict consumer behavior for the purpose of improving marketing practices. This paper connects the academic and practitioner spheres by presenting past and potential EEG research that can be translatable to the marketing industry.

The authors review past literature on the use of EEG to study consumer-related topics in marketing and interdisciplinary fields, to demonstrate its advantages over-traditional methods in studying consumer-relevant behaviors. To foster increasing use of EEG in consumer neuroscience research, the authors further provide technical and marketing-specific considerations for both academic and market researchers. This paper is one of the first to review past EEG papers and provide methodological background insights for marketing researchers.

Reading represents a basic way by which humans understand the world and acquire knowledge; it is also central to learning and communicating. However, with the rapid development of mobile reading, an individual's cognition of objective facts may be affected by the reading environment and text genre, resulting in limited memorization and understanding of the reading material. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the influence of the reading environment and text genre on individuals' cognitive activities from the perspective of motivational activation level using evidence from electroencephalography (EEG) signals.

The study employed a mixed design experiment with two reading environments (quiet and distracting) between subjects, two text genres (entertaining and scientific) within subjects and two reading tasks (memory recall and comprehension) within subjects. There were 50 participants in the experiment, and the data obtained from 44 participants while they read the materials and completed the reading tasks were analyzed.

The results showed that readers are more positively motivated to read in a quiet reading environment than in a distracting reading environment when facing the memory recall tasks of entertaining genre passages and comprehension tasks of scientific genre passages. Entertaining genres are more likely to arouse readers' reading interest but hinder the memory recall of the content details. While scientific genres are not easy to understand, they are helpful for working memory.

This study not only applies a new technology to mobile reading research in the field of library science and addresses the limitations of self-report data, but also provides suggestions for the further improvement of mobile reading service providers. Additionally, the results may provide useful information for learners with different learning demands.