“It’s not just talk”: ideas,discourse, and the prospects for transformational change in a homogenous nation-state

ABSTRACT

Despite decades of large-scale immigration, systemic and institutionalized racism and ethnonationalism remain very strong in South Korea. One reason is obvious: South Korea is the quintessential homogeneous nation-state. Many observers, in fact, believe that it is one of the few societies in the world that is naturally homogenous. For this and other reasons, the prospect that South Korea can or will transform from homogenous nation-state to multicultural society is generally given very short shrift. I argue, however, that small but extremely significant steps toward a multicultural society have already been made and that the key reason is due to the introduction of ‘multiculturalism’ as an idea and discourse in Korean society. While a focus on ideas/discourse is hardly new, this paper contends that it has been seriously underappreciated, particularly in analyses of South Korea, as a cause of institutional stability on the one hand, and of institutional change and transformation, on the other hand.     

The Situational Theory of Publics in a Different Cultural Setting: Consumer Publics in Singapore

In an ever-globalizing world, it behooves one to ask whether, and if so to what extent, the theoretical constructs developed primarily in Western democracies are applicable elsewhere. This study used the Situational theory of publics to assess the communication behaviors of a sample of Singaporeans vis-à-vis the level of customer service in the retail sector. The study surveyed 242 retail customers and conducted 3 focus groups of retail consumers. Results revealed that the situational theory was quite useful in identifying the communication behaviors of consumer publics in Singapore. A majority of the respondents perceived high problem recognition but also displayed constrained behavior in responding to the problem. Only a few respondents exhibited activist behavior as described in the theory. Cultural factors such as deference to authority and collectivism played a significant role in the constrained behaviors of the respondents. We contend that the referent criterion, abandoned for over 2 decades, helps include culture as an independent variable in the theory.     

Losing ground: The persistent declining economic fortunes of children

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate trends in the income status of children, as compared to that of adults and elderly people, from 1991 through 2005. Using the March 1992, 1999, and 2006 Current Population Surveys (CPS), this study examines income distributions of children relative to adults and elderly people at three stages: pre-transfer income, pre-transfer income plus social insurance benefits, and pre-transfer income plus social insurance benefits plus welfare payments. While children as well as adults and elderly people lost economic ground at the post-transfer income stage from 1991 to 2005, the losses experienced by children surpassed those of adults and elderly people. This occurred despite the fact that income growth among children was greater than that of adults and elderly people at the pre-transfer stage – a demonstration of increases in employment income of their parents which coincided with the welfare reforms of 1996. This study also found that declines in the distributive effect of both social insurance benefits and welfare payments were greater for minority children. Policy implications are discussed.     

The spatial dimension of human capital segregation: An empirical investigation for Seoul, Korea

This research note examines changes in the spatial patterns of human capital segregation in Seoul, Korea from 1995 to 2005, and investigates whether spatial clusters of human capital can be isolated across neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. The major finding is that the proportion of college-educated individuals in the population aged 25 years and over increased significantly over the 1995–2005 period, and human capital segregation declined. However, the spatial distribution of human capital is by nature clustered and tends to be more clustered over the period. The neighborhoods with relatively high level of human capital tend to be localized close to other neighboring areas with high level of human capital. Most of these neighborhoods are located in the southern parts of Seoul, and these spatial clusters, which can be considered as hot spots of human capital, persist throughout the period. These results may have important implications for how the spatial dimension of human capital segregation contributes to the manner through which neighborhood effects of human capital impact metropolitan socioeconomic outcomes.     

Robust multivariate mixture regression models with incomplete data

Multivariate mixture regression models can be used to investigate the relationships between two or more response variables and a set of predictor variables by taking into consideration unobserved population heterogeneity. It is common to take multivariate normal distributions as mixing components, but this mixing model is sensitive to heavy-tailed errors and outliers. Although normal mixture models can approximate any distribution in principle, the number of components needed to account for heavy-tailed distributions can be very large. Mixture regression models based on the multivariate t distributions can be considered as a robust alternative approach. Missing data are inevitable in many situations and parameter estimates could be biased if the missing values are not handled properly. In this paper, we propose a multivariate t mixture regression model with missing information to model heterogeneity in regression function in the presence of outliers and missing values. Along with the robust parameter estimation, our proposed method can be used for (i) visualization of the partial correlation between response variables across latent classes and heterogeneous regressions, and (ii) outlier detection and robust clustering even under the presence of missing values. We also propose a multivariate t mixture regression model using MM-estimation with missing information that is robust to high-leverage outliers. The proposed methodologies are illustrated through simulation studies and real data analysis.     

Optimal design of accelerated degradation tests based on Wiener process models

Optimal accelerated degradation test (ADT) plans are developed assuming that the constant-stress loading method is employed and the degradation characteristic follows a Wiener process. Unlike the previous works on planning ADTs based on stochastic process models, this article determines the test stress levels and the proportion of test units allocated to each stress level such that the asymptotic variance of the maximum-likelihood estimator of the qth quantile of the lifetime distribution at the use condition is minimized. In addition, compromise plans are also developed for checking the validity of the relationship between the model parameters and the stress variable. Finally, using an example, sensitivity analysis procedures are presented for evaluating the robustness of optimal and compromise plans against the uncertainty in the pre-estimated parameter value, and the importance of optimally determining test stress levels and the proportion of units allocated to each stress level are illustrated.     

Regression analysis of competing risks data via semi-parametric additive hazard model

When the subjects in a study possess different demographic and disease characteristics and are exposed to more than one types of failure, a practical problem is to assess the covariate effects on each type of failure as well as on all-cause failure. The most widely used method is to employ the Cox models on each cause-specific hazard and the all-cause hazard. It has been pointed out that this method causes the problem of internal inconsistency. To solve such a problem, the additive hazard models have been advocated. In this paper, we model each cause-specific hazard with the additive hazard model that includes both constant and time-varying covariate effects. We illustrate that the covariate effect on all-cause failure can be estimated by the sum of the effects on all competing risks. Using data from a longitudinal study on breast cancer patients, we show that the proposed method gives simple interpretation of the final results, when the primary covariate effect is constant in the additive manner on each cause-specific hazard. Based on the given additive models on the cause-specific hazards, we derive the inferences for the adjusted survival and cumulative incidence functions.     

A baseline summary of framing research in public relations from 1990 to 2009

The present study examines the conceptualization of a frame, theoretical origins, analytical foci, and methods in framing research in public relations from 1990 to 2009. The most dominant type of a frame is construction of reality in communication found in 95% of 40 studies. Researchers compare public relations messages with news coverage, and also analyze public relations messages. Qualitative content analysis is more popular than quantitative content analysis or experiment.