Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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Author: search.filters.author.Lee, Chang Won

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    More than human capital: Global social mobility and categorical inequality among South Koreans
    (2012) Lee, Chang Won; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Social scientists in the modernization school argue that industrialization and modernization lead societies to be "open" societies characterized by equal opportunities and a central importance of individual efforts and achievements in social mobility. They assume, using nation-states as the unit of analysis, that stratification takes place primarily and exclusively within nations. This study, by contrast, perceives stratification and social mobility as processes taking place globally. Shifting its focus from national dimensions to global and transnational dimensions, this study investigates the global social mobility of South Koreans, including Korean immigrants in the United States. This study situates income earnings and social mobility of non-migrant South Koreans and Korean immigrants in the United States within broader patterns of transnational and global social mobility, and reassesses the relative weight of categorical attributes (e.g. country) with that of human capitals (e.g. college education). The results suggest that how social stratification, despite the modernization of South Korea and the United States, remains shaped by categorical inequalities. In this sense, achievement and ascription, as criteria of selection, continue to be fundamental to global stratification. The role of achievement is far more modest than usually assumed when compared to the continuing impact of categorical attributes such as race/ethnicity and nationality.
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    Income Inequality and the capacity of the state in South Korea, 1965-2004
    (2006-05-15) Lee, Chang Won; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This paper focuses on the relationship between income inequality and state capacity in South Korea. Korea achieved rapid economic growth accompanied by equity from the 1960s to the mid 1990s. However, after the 1997 IMF financial crisis, income inequality in Korea increased dramatically. This change in income inequality is closely related to increases in unemployment and underemployment. I argue that such failures in the labor market are attributed to the rapid decline of the state's capacity after financial liberalization in 1993. During the developmental era, the state had been able to form institutions for low income inequality, due to its relative autonomy from business owners. After the financial liberalization no such autonomous capacity to build employment-protective institutions existed, as these reforms increased the influence of domestic and international capital. Further, the weakening of the state's capacity also reflects changes in the relationship of the Korean economy to the world system.