The paper presents selected aspects of critical language pedagogy that are relevant to recent developments in Korean English Education. The paper articulates the personal viewpoint of a scholar outside Korea. Particular emphasis is placed on historical background, the nature of critique, and the role of the intellectual in society. The English Divide in Korea is presented as an issue that calls for a critical perspective on English education. This is briefly analyzed from an economics of education point of view, itself an example of critical pedagogy that does not only focus on classrooms and curriculum theory. Key aspects of critical language pedagogy are sketched, with reference to precursors from Korean history and cultural forms. These precursors are also brought to bear on the role that intellectuals could play in advancing a critical perspective on English education, in Korean society, which is suggested to be a moral imperative, distinct from instrumental understandings of education.
The recent surge of multijurisdictional IP disputes and increase in non-binding soft laws have made scholars cast doubt on the sustainability of public international law and the validity of the current IP legal system. Private lawyers may now think that they do not have to pay keen attention to public international law any longer when providing legal advice to their clients, particularly MNCs. This study makes a concise description of today’s legal environment in the field of IP, focusing on the emerging legal norms of transnational law, particularly in the context of its interplay with public international law. With respect to this, the ongoing and even heightened roles of public international law will be discussed. Finally, a typology is suggested using exponents to express intensity of State sovereignty to facilitate understanding on the relationship between public international law and other categories of law.
SMEs as an organization to succeed and to be sustainable must have the most essential and strategic capital, namely creativity, competitive advantage, and intellectual capital. This study aims to explore how creativity and intellectual capital determines SMEs’ sustainability as well as examine the emerging role of competitive advantage in supporting this relationship. A quantitative method was applied to gain a better understanding of the relationship between variables undergoing Structural Equation Modeling with Partial Least Square (SEM-PLS). This study collected data from 123 SMEs in East Java of Indonesia using an online survey. The approach adopted in this study is a convenience random sampling method, which is widely used in entrepreneurship and SMEs’ sustainability research. The findings showed that intellectual capital positively affects both competitive advantage and SMEs’ sustainability. Additionally, the result of this study confirms a robust relationship between intellectual capital and SMEs’ sustainability. However, partially, creativity failed in explaining SMEs’ sustainability. Furthermore, this study confirmed that competitive advantage has successfully mediated both the influence of creativity and intellectual capital to SMEs’ sustainability. Although this research only involved participants in East Java, this study can be the first step for relevant research of SMEs’ sustainability, in particular, in Indonesia.