From Norm to System: BERTopic Analysis of Re100’s Socio-Technical Institutionalization in Korean News

This study conceptualizes RE100 not merely as a voluntary corporate campaign, but as an evolving socio-technical system that intersects with South Korea’s path-dependent energy regime. Applying BERTopic to a comprehensive corpus of 21,901 raw news articles (reduced to 13,507 analytically relevant articles after noise filtering; January 2019–October 2025), we trace the systemic evolution and multi-layered governance of RE100. Grounded in social constructionism and institutional systems theory, the research reveals how the global sustainability norm becomes structurally embedded in South Korea’s industrial and economic systems through a partially sequential evolutionary process of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. BERTopic identified 39 analytically meaningful topics, subsequently organized into four interpretive clusters: (1) local government-centered construction, (2) spatial reconfiguration and industrial-policy formation, (3) corporate-led market institutionalization, and (4) ESG-driven corporate governance. Collectively, these clusters demonstrate that RE100 has evolved from a peripheral international initiative into a multilayered governance norm embedded across local governance, industrial infrastructure, corporate strategy, and ESG systems. The findings hold theoretical and policy implications for energy-transition governance and climate communication. This progression is recursive rather than strictly linear: corporate-level internalization (Cluster 4) is conceptually linked to, and may interact with, regional and industrial-policy externalization (Clusters 1–2), consistent with a non-linear reading of institutionalization in which corporate site-selection criteria shape local-government infrastructure competition. Cluster 1’s prominence reflects local governments’ discursive visibility rather than substantive policy authority. Notably, RE100’s “normalization” denotes routinized corporate compliance practices, not political consensus on its legitimacy relative to alternatives such as carbon-free 100% or nuclear power.