KJC Korea
Journal Central

Korean academia has sought to secure its own uniqueness differentiating it from global academia. Despite the constant debate over the academic dependency of non-Western scholars on Western academia, there has been little substantive evidence showing whether Korean academia is subordinate to global academia or whether it has developed its own distinctive knowledge discourses. Analysis of this topic is particularly important because the current university evaluation system often provides strong incentives for scholars to publish in journals indexed in the SSCI. If Korean academia features distinctive knowledge structures compared to international academia, then the emphasis on producing SSCI publications may actually be undermining the uniqueness of Korean academia by incentivizing Korean scholars to follow international trends. By analyzing all published research articles in the field of sociology collected from both KCI and SSCI-indexed journals between 2011 and 2018, we compare the similarities and differences of the knowledge discourse structures of Korean and international sociology, focusing on three key points: shared terms, topic distribution, and networks of topics. Our results show that Korean and international academia share rather few academic terms, that there are distinct differences in the topics of interest between KCI and SSCI. Also, our results demonstrate that Korean sociology produces knowledge discourses in response to the changing needs of Korean society, and that Korean academia connects topics in different ways than international academia. In light of these findings, we discuss the role of scholars and scholarship with respect to the development of Korean academia.

This study examines political and psychological effects of ambivalent sexism. The effects of sexism, which is different from biological sex and sociological gender, are witnessed in political areas beyond psychological and sociological areas. By conducting an experimental survey, we analyze how ambivalent sexism affects Korean voters' political attitudes when gender issues are salient in election campaigns. Our findings present that hostile and benevolent sexism have similar political effects even though they show different emotional reactions. Specifically, while hostile sexism reacts to sexist political elites in a direct and active way, benevolent sexism in an indirect and passive way. Hence, we suggest that gender-discriminational remarks of political elites can activate voters' latent sexism during election campaigns, which in turn influence their political attitudes.

The South Korean government did not recognize so-called ‘mixed-blood’ people who were born to U. S. servicemen and Korean women as full citizens, and therefore exported them overseas as adoptees or excluded them from the system of military conscription. In contrast, the government has endeavored to integrate the children of ‘multicultural families’, i.e., interracial marriages, a group that has recently emerged because of the increase in migrants since the late 1990s. What caused this transition? What commonalities and differences do these two policies have? To answer these questions, this paper attempts a historical sociological analysis of the genealogy of ‘mixed-blood’ people policy and ‘multicultural family’ policy in Korea. Borrowing from Michel Foucault, this article characterizes the former as a ‘juridical-disciplinary system’ and the latter as an instance of ‘governmentality’. Simultaneously, however, it maintains that both approaches are the mirror image of each other and built on the same notions of a national membership structure composed of patrilineage, legal marriage, and paternal principles of jus sanguinis. This politics of membership is also an instance of gender politics, founded on patriarchal laws that attribute family lineage, nationality, and national blood to male fertility. Based on this assertion, this paper argues that various challenges and difficulties that ‘mixed-blood’ people and multicultural families face in Korea can be solved only by radically transforming the gender politics of national membership.

This paper examines the promise of happy lateness and its cultural implications, which have been popularized through the documentaries since 2000s. These documentaries are contributed to provide the positive emotional norms of aging related to the successful aging discourses. However, on the one hand, there is a problem that these documentaries can naturalize and justify the homogenized, biased images and socioscapes dominantly shaping the images of the older peoples. On the other hand, these contemporary popular documentaries tend to link the norms of good aging with the traditional but lost moral values. As a result, while the particular affective promises of happy lateness are constructed through these narratives of happy aging, the realities of aging, such as the marginalized or ‘unhappy’ (unsuccessful) aging, can be paradoxically concealed and distorted. In this respect, the author shows the way that these narratives intentionally erase out the wretchedness of old age, and questions how the cultural politics of aging is entwined with this dichotomy of ‘happy/unhappy’ aging emotions. In this point, this paper critically reexamines the cultural ideals of happy lateness and reconsiders the emotions of the old people in terms of the individualized ethics of the precarious society.

Prior studies on the generational inequality analyzed household income using the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) and argued that the between-generational earnings gap has increased. Generational inequality, however, should be measured based on the individual labor market earnings. The results of previous studies may suffer from the omitted variable bias as they failed to control for relevant covariates. Prior studies did not distinguish the net effect of generation on earnings from the effect associated with the change in age composition. In this study, we estimate individual labor market earnings using the 1999~2019 HIES and assess whether the net effect of generation has increased in accounting for earnings inequality. Our empirical results show that contrary to the popular perception and prior studies, between-generation inequality has not grown. The detailed decomposition results which control for education and other covariates indicate that the growth of between-generational inequality is fully attributable to the increase in the size of the older population. The net effect of generation did not change. No evidence supports that the dominance of the 86 Generation at the upper labor market causes the growth in earnings inequality either. The relative increase in earnings among the 86 Generation is evident only at the lower part of the earnings distribution. These results cast serious doubt on the validity of the claim that generation is a key structural dimension of earnings inequality in South Korea.