Hayeon Lee, 2013-2014 Korea Foundation Fellow
Joint Program in Social Work and Anthropology
Transnational marriage migration and Vietnamese-Korean families
It is predicted that by 2020, one out of every five families in South Korea will be a mixed or so-called “multicultural” family. This is a result of the Korean government’s active support for marriage migration of women from China and countries in Southeast Asia since the 1990s as a way of dealing with the country’s persistent social problems: the rising number of rural bachelors, low fertility rates, and a rapidly aging population. Transnational marriage migration and multicultural families have generated intense debates in South Korea, especially on what it means to be “Korean” and ways to assimilate such large number of foreign women and mixed children into Korean society. However, there is limited discussion on how these multicultural families – mainly through the efforts of marriage migrant women – maintain and create transnational ties with the people that the women leave behind in their home country. This talk will discuss the case of Vietnamese-Korean families and the impact these families have on both Vietnamese and Korean societies through their cultural practices and new transnational ties and spaces that they create.
Joon Sung Lee, 2014-2015 Academy of Korean Studies Fellow
School of Kinesiology
Impact of Sociocultural Background on Consumer Moral Reasoning Choice: Korean vs. American Consumer
Even in the globalized marketplaces, fundamental cultural values have been known to still remain different across cultures (e.g., Western culture: independent self-construal; Eastern culture: interdependent self-construal). However, to date, empirical research on impacts of different sociocultural backgrounds on sport consumers’ responses to athlete endorsers’ immoral transgression remains sparse. Drawing on moral reasoning literature, an experiment (N = 223: 109 from Korea and 113 from the U.S.) was conducted to examine impacts of participants’ sociocultural backgrounds on their moral reasoning choices and its subsequent impacts on brand evaluations affiliated with a transgressed athlete. The results showed that both Korean and American tend to activate their moral coupling strategy (integrating performance and morality judgments) when the transgression is closely related to the athlete’s performance on the field. However, Korean participants activated their moral coupling strategy more than American participants even when they are exposed both to the performance-unrelated transgression and the no-transgression conditions. In addition, Korean participants tend to more strongly believe that associated organizations (e.g., the team and the league that the transgressed athlete belongs to) should make a public apology for the athlete’s misconduct. Findings provide empirical evidence to explain how different types of self-construals work in consumers’ mind across cultures.
This program is also made possible in part by a Title VI grant from the US Department of Education.
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U-M Graduate Students
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