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The first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was documented in China, and the virus was soon to be introduced to its neighboring country – South Korea. South Korea, one of the earliest countries to initiate a national pandemic response to COVID-19 with fairly substantial measures at the individual, societal and governmental level, is an interesting example of a rapid response by the Global South. The current study examines contact tracing mobile applications (hereafter, contact tracing apps) for those who were subject to self-quarantine through the lenses of dataveillance and datafication. This paper analyzes online/digital data from those who were mandatorily self-quarantined by the Korean government largely due to returning from overseas travel.

This study uses an Internet ethnography approach to collect and analyze data. To extract data for this study, self-quarantined Korean individuals' blog entries were collected and verified with a combination of crawling and manual checking. Content analysis was performed with the codes and themes that emerged. In the COVID-19 pandemic era, this method is particularly useful to gain access to those who are affected by the situation. This approach advances the author’s understandings of COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps and the experiences of self-quarantined people who use them.

The paper shows Korean citizens' understandings and views of using the COVID-19 self-tracing application in South Korea through examining their experiences. The research argues that the application functions as a datafication tool that collects the self-quarantined people's information and performs dataveillance on the self-quarantined people. This research further offers insights for various agreements/disagreements at different actors (i.e. the self-quarantined, their families, contact tracers/government officials) in the process of contact tracing for COVID-19.

This study also provides insights into the implications of information and technology as they affect datafication and dataveillance conducted on the public. This study investigates an ongoing debate of COVID-19's contact tracing method concerning privacy and builds upon an emerging body of literature on datafication, dataveillance, social control and digital sociology.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0377

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how big data analytics pushed the limits of individuals' accountability as South Korea tried to control and contain coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The authors draw upon Deleuzo-Guattarian framework elaborating how a surveillant assemblage was rhizomatically created and operated to monitor a segment of the population holding them accountable. Publicly available secondary data, such as press release from the government and media coverage, were used.

A COVID-19 Smart Management System and a Self-Quarantine Safety Protection App constituted a surveillance assemblage operating in a “state-form”. This comprises the central government departments, local councils, policing systems, providers of telecommunication and financial services, and independent groups of people. This assemblage pushed the limits of accountability as individuals who tested positive or might bear possible future risks of the infection and transmission were held accountable for their locations and health conditions.

Policymakers may consider constructing this type of state-form for containing and controlling pandemics, such as COVID-19, while dealing with the issue of undermined privacy.

The mass may consider to what extent individuals' personal information should be protected and how to hold the governments accountable for the legitimate use of such information.

While accountability studies have largely focussed on formal organisations, the authors illustrated how a broader context of a state-form, harnessing big data analytics, pushes the limits of accountability.

Community health is placed under the limelight during the COVID-19 crisis, providing a unique context for investigating citizens' health-privacy tradeoff in accepting social surveillance technology. To elucidate this tradeoff dilemma, an extended privacy calculus framework integrated with the Health Belief Model, legislative protection, and individual collectivism was examined using the case of national contact-tracing apps.

The hypotheses were tested through PLS-SEM analysis with data collected from a survey on Bluezone – a national app in Vietnam.

The results indicated the negative impact of privacy concerns, which was offset by the positive effect of perceived benefits in using contact-tracing apps. The effect size of perceived benefits on usage frequency was twice as large as that of privacy concerns. Individual collectivism was revealed as a mitigator of the tradeoff dilemma, as it was positively associated with perceived benefits, whereas legislative protection had no such role. Citizens may perceive legislation protection as invalid when the technologies are developed, implemented, and monitored by the authorities.

The theoretical contributions lie in the extension of the privacy calculus model as well as its application in the context of mobile health apps and surveillance technology. The study empirically corroborated that the privacy calculus theory holds when technologies move along the pervasiveness spectrum. This study also provided actionable insights for policymakers and developers who advocate the mass acceptance of national contact-tracing apps.

The media has even been very critical of some East Asian countries’ use of digital contact-tracing to control Covid-19. For example, South Korea has been criticised for its use of privacy-infringing digital contact-tracing. However, whether their type of digital contact-tracing was unnecessarily harmful to the human rights of Korean citizens is open for debate. The purpose of this paper is to examine this criticism to see if Korea’s digital contact-tracing is ethically justifiable.

This paper will evaluate Korea’s digital contact-tracing through the lens of the four human rights principles to determine if their response is ethically justifiable. These four principles were originally outlined in the European Court of Human Rights, namely, necessary, proportional, scientifically valid and time-bounded (European Court of Human Rights 1950).

The paper will propose that while the use of Korea’s digital contact-tracing was scientifically valid and proportionate (albeit, in need for improvements), it meets the necessity requirement, but is too vague to meet the time-boundedness requirement.

The Covid-19 pandemic has proven to be one of the worst threats to human health and the global economy in the past century. There have been many different strategies to tackle the pandemic, from somewhat laissez-faire approaches, herd immunity, to strict draconian measures. Analysis of the approaches taken in the response to the pandemic is of high scientific value and this paper is one of the first to critically engage with one of these methods – digital contact-tracing in South Korea.

Until recently, the business environment was characterized by a world in which nations were more connected than ever before. Unfortunately, the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has virtually ended the borderless and globalized world we were accustomed to. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic at a news conference in Geneva on March 11, 2020. The multifaceted nature of this invisible virus is impacting the world at many levels, and this unprecedented pandemic may best be characterized as an economic and health war against humanity. More international cooperation is crucial for effectively dealing with the present pandemic (and future pandemics) because all nations are vulnerable, and it is highly unlikely that any pandemic would affect only one country. Therefore, this case study takes a sociological approach, examining various social institutions and cultural facets (i.e., government, press freedom, information technology [IT] infrastructure, healthcare systems, and institutional collectivism) to understand how South Korea is handling the crisis while drawing important implications for other countries. All aspects of how Korea is handling COVID-19 may not be applicable to other countries, such as those with fewer IT infrastructures and less institutional collectivism. However, its methods still offer profound insights into how countries espousing democratic values rooted in openness and transparency to both domestic and worldwide communities can help overcome the current challenge. As such, the authors believe that Korea's innovative approach and experience can inform other nations dealing with COVD-19, while also leading to greater international collaboration for better preparedness when such pandemics occur in the future. This case study also considers implications for both public policy and organization, and the authors pose critical questions and offer practical solutions for dealing with the current pandemic.

This paper aims to discuss characteristics of Korea’s system responses with a research framework of the structure, conduct and performance theory and explain the role of information, communication technologies (ICT) and Big Data from a technology-mediated control (TMC) perspective.

This study examines the contextual nature of Korea’s diagnostic, preventive and treatment efforts. Particular attention is paid to issues related to the effective use of Big Data analytics and its applications, reporting mechanisms and public safety measures. The research model defines key factors in assessing the effectiveness of Korea’s responses.

Findings of this research suggest: effective strategic planning and operational execution use well-tested and designed crisis-responsive manuals; linkage role of ICT/Big Data is prominent in trace, test and treat and participation (3T + P); and aggressive epidemic investigations require synergistic efforts of national and local government units, broad societal support and participation and contribution of global firms offering their domestic and global supply chain network capabilities.

The Korean Government's effective response experiences suggest the synergy of political, social, cultural and technological factors. Future studies may explore how personal privacy and public safety are both achieved in different social–cultural–political contexts (Ahn et al., 2020; Delgado et al., 2020; Sharma and Bashir, 2020). Other emerging organizational issues and international comparative studies are worth further investigation in future studies.

This case study suggests how to apply ICT capabilities for organizing a national response to the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) pandemic. Public and private partnership in the framework of sociotechnological synergy (i.e. integration of ICT and social orchestration) is essential for the 3T process. In support of public policy initiatives, global firms share their IT infrastructure and supply chain integration experiences to accommodate global-level crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study extends the TMC framework to a national level. In the adapted TMC framework, the control source, control target and linkage mechanism are specified. Using TMC, this shows the dynamic roles of ICT/Big Data in Korea’s COVID-19 response experiences.

The impacts of the COVID-19 are rapid and enormous. Despite the controversial early policy decisions and the rapid rise of confirmed patients, the world has recognized Korea’s effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

The purpose for writing this article is derived from the misery and chaos prevalent in the world due to the coronavirus pandemic – since late 2019 and still continuing as of December 2020.

A blockchain-based solution to verify the country visit trail and disease and treatment history of the passengers who arrive at the immigration counters located at various national borders and entry points is proposed. A fuzzy inference based suspect identifier system is also presented in this article that could be utilized to make further decisions based on the degree of suspicion observed on a particular passenger.

This paper attempted to put forth a blockchain-based system which consumes the healthcare and visit trail summary of a passenger (appearing for an interview before an immigration officer) and forwards it to a fuzzy inference system to reach to a conclusion that the passenger should be advised to self-quarantine, detained, or should be allowed to enter. Such a system would help to make correct decisions at the immigration counters to check pandemic diseases, like COVID-19, right at the entry points.

The implications of this work are manifold. First, the proposed framework works independent of the type of pandemic and is a readymade tool to check the spread of disease through infected human carriers. Second, the proposed framework will keep the mortality rates under check, which would give ample time for the authorities to save the lives of the people with co-morbidities and age vulnerabilities (Vichitvanichphong et al., 2018). Third, it is a general phenomenon to restrict the flights from the country where the first few cases of infection are discovered; however, the infected person, at the same time, might travel through alternative routes. The blockchain-enabled proposed framework ensures the detection of such cases at no other cost. Finally, the solution may appear costly in the first place, but it has the potential to hold back the revenue of the countries that would otherwise be spent on reactive measures.

As of now no other study or research article provides the solution to the biggest problem persists in the world in this way. The contribution is original and worth applying.

Coronavirus disease 2019 is one of the novel diseases formed by a dreadful virus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2. Various countries are affected by this viral disease, and many countries declare a lockdown with several rules and conditions. To prevent this rapid viral transmission, various researchers have introduced different mobile applications. This paper aims to study issues like viral transmission, mortality rates, vaccination rates, etc. and also provides suitable solutions based on the statistical analysis with the assistance of the Six-Sigma Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control (DMAIC) concept.

Statistical analysis is done for different countries, and the required solutions are provided by using the DMAIC procedure. This application has the ability to represent the current risk status of the user and notify them to secure themselves.

The proposed work suggests the Aarogya Setu application to prevent large viral transmission by affording many preventive measures. This application also issues the current risk status of each individual user. Hence, it gives improved results in avoiding high viral transmission.

The proposed six-sigma DMAIC concept also affords the control measures to prevent viral transmission. Hence, the suggested application has the highest chance of avoiding the rapid viral transmission.