Organizational Politics Surrounding the Interpretation of "Public Interest": A Case of Korean Public Broadcasting Corporation.

This paper investigates the relationship between organizational politics in a public broadcasting corporation and the corporation's resulting interpretation of the public interest principle. Public interest, the most widely referred policy principle behind public broadcasting, remains difficult to define. While previous studies on the public interest principle have focused on the normative, legal, or macro-political interactive processes between and among policy actors, this paper focuses on the internal politics within the sub-units or departments of a public broadcasting corporation. Based on a survey of employees across 10 departments, this study extracted 2 frames with which to interpret the public interest: public interest as a duty and public interest as a service. The relationship of these 2 frames with the organization members' attitude toward the privatization of the public broadcasting system was then determined. The results show that organizational politics is more related to structural differences than to individual differences. This implies that the broadcasting industry is a dynamic coalition of heterogeneous groups and that organizational politics should be considered when formulating or implementing the public interest policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]