The prime task of advancing the research on publicness is to approach it from middle-range theory. Middle-range theory of publicness enables researchers to study publicness with tangible concepts and measurements. In this respect, this article aims de...
The prime task of advancing the research on publicness is to approach it from middle-range theory. Middle-range theory of publicness enables researchers to study publicness with tangible concepts and measurements. In this respect, this article aims develop indicators of publicness and examine how the meaning and components of publicness changes over time from a historical perspective. Above all, we classify publicness into three parts: the public citizenship in the political dimension, the public interest in the economic dimension, and the public openness in the communication dimension. Then, we show that the characteristics of publicness has been shaped by the historical relationships between the state, market, and civil society. We use concept of ‘historical frame of publicness’ to describe how the publicness has been constructed and changed in modern Korean history. In Korean modern history, the historical frames of publicness has been constructed from ‘absolute publicness’, ‘national publicness’, and to ‘life publicness.’