Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Drawing on the author's ethnographic and textual analysis research over a five-year period in the United States, the paper observes that older generations of workers are getting used to the new models of technology-driven communication but may not feel "at home" in them. The author suggests steps for policy makers to stimulate and reward older workers, whose roles in the "new work" are both vital and threatened. Proceeding from data suggesting that work status often drives home computer and Internet competencies and usage in the lives of Americans over 50, the author acknowledges that the advancing age of Baby Boomers will cause some generational differences in competency and usage to disappear, but cultural differences among elders will persist. Effective public policy for curing the Digital Divide must include attention to older Americans on the margins, many of whom are single women, racial minorities, and residents of central-city or rural areas, the author claims. Recommendations include:
1. Tailor retirement systems for individual differences.
2. Make employment sectors elder friendly.
3. Make the educational system non-discriminatory.
4. Eliminate ageist practices inside the academy.
5. Strengthen policies to deter age discrimination by employers.
6. Encourage inclusive images of older workers.
7. Stop retrofitting facilities to "shoehorn" in disabled (often older) workers.
8. Encourage intergenerational learning communities.
9. Pursue age studies and intergenerational research.
The author concludes that citizens must assume a collective responsibility for re-creating social environments that will accommodate unprecedented complexities of intergenerational living in today's world.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the mechanism of the regular worker union attitude to irregular workers with considering relation between regular worker union and employer in Korea labor market. By logistic regression using WPS 2004 data, the result shows that the relationship of these three agents keeps balanced statuses as Heider’s Balance theory. Regular worker unions tend to be exclusive to irregular workers when they keep good relation with employer. But when they keep bad relation with employer, they tend to friendly to irregular workers.
It is because most of labor unions don’t willingly submit themselves to the risk for speaking for irregular workers against employers when they are in good relation with employers. Since regular workers are the same workers who are in unstable employment. Cost for helping is too high when they keep good relationship. So their attitude is a result of rational choice which is stemmed from calculating cost and benefit. And when unions think the relationship with employer is bad, their best strategy to cope with the condition is enlarging the organization against employment so unions try to enlarge the organization by including irregular workers. That’s why unions’ attitude changes to friendly.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Viewing three specific nationally-based projects in what appears at first glance to be quite contrasting choices for case studies, i.e. South Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, it has become clear that employability is an idea that has become almost a matter of common sense to inform policy making. These three countries each hold a different economic and social history, but their respective national skills revolutions have occurred at a similar pace, and at a simultaneous time. This would not have surprised Meyer (1997), who notes that despite distinct histories, organisations within varying nation-states appear to converge in more ways than they diverge. Meyer cites Jepperson and Meyer (1991), Soysal (1994), Dobbin (1994), and Guillen (1994) to back up his claims for the objective nature of a world culture which would inevitably emerge from a desert island if given the chance. Meyer (et al) admit that this world culture is a Western invention, with a limited admission for locally specific ways of expressing what he interprets to be global norms, which these authors believe will be ultimately beneficial to all states. Meyer’s study is therefore not critical of the impact of related policy on the day to day lives of people who are most immediately impacted by such convergence projects. For the present paper, however, workers are seen as those most affected by employability-enhancing projects that are created in campaigns for globalization. It is claimed that workers are most often overlooked in discussions, and this must be addressed in order to give a complete picture of what has happened as a result of three countries’ modernization campaigns, and in particular, the modernization of the public sector and financial services.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Feminists have challenged notions of labor politics that rest on the putatively gender-neutral category of “worker” by revealing the systematic exclusion of women workers from organized labor politics at every level. Because of the masculinist assumptions that underlie shop-floor and firm level worker politics, however, women workers are apt to actively disidentify with the category worker, which further limits their involvement in labor politics. At the same time that women workers do not fit the primary identity category that organizes work life and politics within the social space of the factory, they also experience the dissonance of working in public spaces in a social context where discursive representations of normative (bourgeois) femininity fetishize domesticity. What is the status of this subject who is thus rendered neither ‘woman’ or ‘worker?’ Through a close reading of the life history of a young woman worker in a television factory in Delhi, this paper examines the theoretical and methodological challenges that her experiences pose to the general categories–‘worker’ and ‘woman’–that she represents.

The material realities of class dictate that third world women workers’ lives are typically represented through life (hi)stories instead of (auto)biographies. The narrative form of a life-story enables moving between the private patriarchy of domesticity and the public patriarchy of labor regimes in exploring the political subjectivity of neophyte factory women, the historicity of women's lives and gender relations, and the re-writing of the cultural scripts for gender, thereby particularizing generalized depictions of ‘The Indian Woman,’ or Bharatiya Nari.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: With expansion of neo-liberal economic system around the world, the global society has been newly reorganized in the name of 'globalization', and this change has also had influence upon international movement of labor. New terms like 'migrant workers' has begun to be used in international labor market, and South Korea could not be an exception in this trend. In fact, Korea was one of typical countries exporting labor, but this situation was reversed in 1990s when influx of foreign immigrant workers was rapidly increased and various social problems stemming from it were occurred.
The main purpose in this study is to examine means of producing discourses by media which makes major discourses ideologically biased toward nationalism. It will be analyzed how the media gives a concrete form to abstract ideology, and how the ideological discourses transform some subtle cultural and/or social differences into fundamental differences. More specifically, it will be examined how foreign immigrant workers in South Korea are represented in Korean TV and how the discourses based on exclusive nationalism and on the alienation of foreigners are fortified. For a comparative purpose, the image of Korean emigrant workers working in foreign countries represented in Korean TV will be examined, too. Through these processes, it will be consulted how this 'dual perspective' of the media towards 'They(Others)' and 'We(Ourselves)' in Korean society functioned and how the discourses immanent in this perspective or the discourses reorganized by this perspective should be interpreted.
The texts of more than 20 TV documentaries aired by three major television channels in Korea treating problems related to 'foreign immigrant workers' and 'Korean emigrant workers' will be closely analyzed. In this study, the analysis of the texts will be composed of analysis of description, analysis of critical discourses, and analysis of image texts, however relative overlapping of these three are inevitable. TV documentaries will be multi-laterally analyzed based on three categories: Image as visual description; Narration and Interview as explanation; and Descriptive structure as overall unfolding. Finally, the actual state of cultural and social discourses represented by the media will be estimated.
While studies on migrant workers have been limited to a few categories such as national policy making and anthropological study, we researchers hope this study will contribute to the understanding of media discourses concerning discrimination against foreign migrant workers and cultural exclusionism.