The Social Life of Human Capital: The Rise of Social Economy, Entrepreneurial Subject, and Neosocial Government in South Korea

This dissertation explores the rise of social economy in South Korea, in order to understand the transformations of sociality, ethicality, and subjectivity in the contemporary capitalism. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, we have witnessed “the return of the social” through introduction of various socio-economic projects—such as social economy, social innovation, and social entrepreneurship—that aim to graft morality and sociality onto the market. In the last decade, South Korea’s social economy sector has also grown quickly with the active support and promotion by the government, representing a new model of development as well as a feasible solution to reproduction crisis. This rapid growth has generated public and academic debates over whether the returned “socials” are the seeds of post-neoliberalism or just an ideological cloak for the expansion of market rationality. Based on ethnographic research on the social economy sector in Seoul, this dissertation focuses on an often-neglected question in these debates: what forms of the social imaginary, knowledge, subjectivity, and ethicality have emerged in the new “socials” as a result of the imbrication of moral aspirations with the neoliberal human condition? To address the question, I first demonstrate how contemporary neoliberalism presupposes a new form of homo œconomicus, human capital, who is expected to manage all the aspects of life within a single value frame, acting as a “portfolio manager.” As the new subjectivity incorporates non-economic elements—including social logics and moral orientations—as assets that can be translated into economic value, the responsibilities for society and the construction of social bonds are directly devolved on the new economic subjects. This dissertation goes on to show how the financial logic of human capital has conditioned and created a new sociality and ethicality. In examining the various fields from community development through the social care market to fair trade activism, I trace how community, care, affective labor, and ethical practices have been intermingled and articulated with the new form of economic rationality and have contributed to the economization of sociality and ethicality. Notions such as “enterprization of community,” “projective ethicality,” “affective labor (hwaldong),” and “marketized gift-exchange” are discussed to flesh out the transformation and articulation more clearly. Finally, this thesis conceptualizes the dynamics of the new subjectivity, ethicality, and social imaginary in terms of “neosocial government,” in which the crisis of the neoliberal human capital regime is managed and addressed through social ties based on care, affective labor, and gift. In unveiling how the new governing rationality prioritizes and reifies intimate social bonds over political engagement and structural transformation, this dissertation not only illuminates the depoliticized aspects of the newly returned socials but also highlights the necessity of reinventing a universal vision of politics upon which the broken link between social solidarity and politics can be restored

Spin torques and anomalous velocity in spin textures induced by fast electron injection from topological ferromagnets: The role of gauge fields

A new method for analysing magnetization dynamics in spin textures under the influence of fast electron injection from topological ferromagnetic sources such as Dirac half metals has been proposed. These electrons, traveling at a velocity $v$ with a non-negligible value of $v/c$ (where c is the speed of light), generate a non-equilibrium magnetization density in the spin-texture region, which is related to an electric dipole moment via relativistic interactions. When this resulting dipole moment interacts with gauge fields in the spin-texture region, an effective field is created that produces spin torques. These torques, like spin-orbit torques that occur when electrons are injected from a heavy metal into a ferromagnet, can display both damping-like and anti-damping-like properties. Finally, we demonstrate that such an interaction between the dipole moment and the gauge field introduces an anomalous velocity that can contribute to transverse electrical conductivity in the spin texture in a way comparable to the topological Hall effect

A new palladium alloy with near-ideal hydrogen storage performance

Hydrogen-based fuels demand high-density storage that can operate under ambient temperatures. Pd and its alloys are the most investigated metal hydrides for hydrogen fuel cell applications. This study presented an alternative Pd alloy for hydrogen storage that can store and release hydrogen at room temperature. The surface of the most studied Pd (110) was modified with Au and Rh so that the hydrogen adsorption energy was 0.49 eV and the release temperature was 365 K. Both values are quite near to the optimum values for the adsorption energy and release temperature of a hydrogen fuel cell in real-world usage

PASTA: Python Algorithms for Searching Transition stAtes

Chemical reactions are often associated with an energy barrier along the reaction pathway which hinders the spontaneity of the reaction. Changing the energy barrier along the reaction pathway allows one to modulate the performance of a reaction. We present a module, Python Algorithms for Searching Transition stAtes (PASTA), to calculate the energy barrier and locate the transition state of a reaction efficiently. The module is written in python and can perform nudged elastic band, climbing image nudged elastic band and automated nudged elastic band calculations. These methods require the knowledge of the potential energy surface (and its gradient along some direction). This module is written such that it works in conjunction with density functional theory (DFT) codes to obtain this information. Presently it is interfaced with three well known DFT packages: Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package (VASP), Quantum Espresso and Spanish Initiative for Electronic Simulations with Thousands of Atoms (SIESTA). This module is easily extendable and can be interfaced with other DFT, force-field or empirical potential based codes. The uniqueness of the module lies in its user-friendliness. For users with limited computing resources, this module will be an effective tool as it allows to perform the calculations image by image. On the other hand, users with plentiful computing resources (such as users in a high performance computing environment) can perform the calculations for large number of images simultaneously. This module gives users complete flexibility, thereby enabling them to perform calculations on large systems making the best use of the available resources