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Sociology Department> Research > The Sociology of Asia and the Pacific

The Sociology of Asia and the Pacific

Introduction

Our department ranks high in offering a quality comparative program of study and research on Asia. The department combines theoretical approaches and research methods with substantive work and knowledge of contemporary East Asian societies. The department works closely with the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies and the East-West Center to provide a broad range of teaching and research opportunities. The aim is to prepare students for career opportunities requiring an analytical understanding of contemporary East Asian societies in relation to the wider context of increasing globalization and interdependency in that world region.

Our East Asian specialists all have strong language and area qualifications, and are members of their respective area center faculties in the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies. Our faculty have provided national leadership in the American Sociological Association in fostering sociological research in Asia, and have served as as major movers and officers of international, national, and institutional organizations and programs in the study of Asia.

Major research and publication activities of our faculty (and students) involve studies of social, economic, and political developments and changes in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and allied regions and nations. These studies include both long term studies of development and social change in single countries, and comparative studies of social processes of development. They encompass topics such as the effects of industrialization and development on class and gender relations, democratization and political dissent, the emergence of social movements and their impact on Asian societies, small groups processes and individual-level social change, and changes and continuity in the criminal justice systems in Asia. The studies range from large scale historical analysis and surveys to qualitative empirical using interviews, observation, and systematic content analysis of various kinds of social documents.

The department maintains strong ties with the Population and Health program at the East West Center. Our faculty and graduate students are engaged in research in cooperation with affiliate faculty from the East-West Center in research on factors in population control, studies of migration and demographic change, research on changes in households and families, and issues of social change and health in Asia, using national censuses and large sample surveys. The Department continues to be involved in the UH Population Studies Program, where students can earn a Certificate in Population Studies.

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Activities

The East Asia study group
The East Asia study group meets once a week to hear and comment on sociological work on East Asia.

The department's East Asia group meets weekly in the department multi-purpose room. Our faculty specialists on East Asia (Pat Steinhoff, Hagen Koo, David Johnson, and Sun-Ki Chai) join graduate stdents interested in East Asia for a brownbag lunch, casual conversation, and occasional presentations. Both students and faculty use these informal gatherings to try out new research ideas and paper presentations.

Once or twice a year the group meets for dinner at a nearby Chinese, Japanese, or Korean restaurant, followed by a karaoke session for the musically inclined.

 

Recent Projects

Hagen Koo's current research involves two areas. One is the continuing study of Korean labor. He investigates current changes in the Korean labor movement as a consequence of globalization and neoliberal economic reform. He also conducts a more serious theoretical analysis of the Korean experience of class formation from a comparative historical perspective. His second research agenda is concerned with the Korean middle class. As in his previous work on the Korean working class formation, he approaches the formation of the middle class as a social and cultural formation, and as a product of symbolic struggle for distinction and privilege. Rather than simply trying to understand the social character of the middle class in itself, he looks, through the window of the middle class, into the nature of Korean modernity and its contemporary transformation in the age of globalization. The aim of this project to write a book on the Korean middle class and modernity.

Yean-ju Lee has been working on two research projects, both of which focus on East Asia, including Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. One, dealing with changes in marriage and family institutions, is devoted to the Korean case and funded by the Korea Research Foundation. The traditional Korean family was characterized by family-centered solidarity and by Confucian hierarchical order based on members' gender and generation, but in recent years there appear signs of rapid transformations. Marriages and childbearing are no longer universal among young people, and divorce occurs to married couples of all ages. In Korea, as of 2002, the crude divorce rate is approximately 3 per 1,000 population, the second highest among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries next only to the United States. One topic in this research is titled, "Divorce Surge in Korea: Are Rises in Women's Socioeconomic Status Responsible?" Another one is, "New International Families in Korea: So-Called 'Wild-Goose Fathers (gireogi abba)' Phenomenon." Her second research project is more broad in its scope and deals with health inequalities by socioeconomic status (SES) in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Key measures of SES include education, lifetime occupation, income, and wealth, and health indicators to be examined include disease, self-rated general health, and disability statuses. This project consists of several subtopics: from the one focusing on gender comparisons, to the one dealing with elderly population, and to the one exploring the associations between spousal SES and health. Data are from National Health Surveys across the three countries and also from national elderly surveys.

Sun-Ki Chai has been working on a project that seeks to account for the distinctive economic institutions of the East Asian economic "miracle". For this project, he combines the major theoretical approaches to understanding East Asian economies: the "Confucian Capitalism" approach, which attributes both economic success and difficulties to traditional values and beliefs and the "Developmental State" approach, which attributes outcomes to the state-centered policies initiated by East Asian governments such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. He looks at the use of culture both as internalized attitudes and as ideological resources, then integrates these concepts into a formal choice-theoretical framework. He is also working on a project to locate and analyze virtual communities of policy discourse in the Asia-Pacific region, using a software agent he has devised that automatically locates and collects sociologically relevant from topic-specific websites. The long-term aim of this latter project is twofold: to produce a practical general tool for collecting social data from the world wide web and to generate systematic research on online social networks.