Keywords

According to the Thomson Reuters Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), Asia is currently third in rank for production of social scientific publications measured by continent. In 2007 it accounted for one sixth of social science output in North American journals and around one fourth of their European counterparts (Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson 2010). Its share in the major Western scientific citation databases is rapidly growing – around ten per cent of the total output. Asian social sciences are also strongly internationalizing. SSCI data on citations in the 200 most-cited journals in Asian social science published between 1993 and 2005 show a rapid decline in citations of papers from the author’s own region (referred to as “self-citation”). North American journals accounted for 54.1 per cent of the citations and European journals for 41.8 per cent (Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson 2010). Furthermore, in the past two decades the rate of transnational publications with at least one Asian author has been rising. These figures indicate the global importance of Asian social science at a time when Asia is gaining prominence in the world-system (Lee 2000) and call for a better understanding of the patterns of scientific transnationalization and of the position of non-Western countries in global social science.

To grasp more accurately the relationships between Western and Asian social sciences, this paper analyses the place of Western references in Japanese and South Korean social sciences, with a special emphasis on sociology . We start our inquiry with a case study based on a collection of data from the Japan Sociological Society, the Ministry of Education, the National Diet Library and other academic libraries, as well as from several discussions and interviews with Japanese sociologists. South Korean social sciences, then, provide another case study, with data coming from the SSCI, the Korea Citation Index (KCI-Thomson Reuters), the Ministry of Education and the Korea Higher Education Research Institute (KHEI), cross-checked with results from a fieldwork survey and several interviews (n = 33) with Korean publishers, journalists, translators and professors, scholars and students in sociology and political science.

It was not always possible to get commensurate data for Japan and South Korea, as each country has its own statistical system and has followed a specific path with regard to the importation of Western social sciences. We nevertheless believe that contrasting the two cases is fruitful as our findings tend, first, to relativize the idea of a unilateral dependency of East Asian sociology towards North American or European authors. Indeed, the dependency of the social sciences of the Global South with regard to the West has various dimensions that need to be differentiated analytically (Keim 2010). The Western research traditions may, first, define the legitimate research questions of the Global South. The Western research traditions may also define the theoretical frames, methods, concepts and the references used by Global South social scientists. Finally, Western countries may have a prominent role in the institution building and the funding of research communities outside their regions or in the training and the mechanisms of social recognition (degree certification, publishing, visibility in international scientific databases etc.) of the dependent countries’ researchers. In this chapter, we discuss only some aspects of the structural and historically long relation of domination between Western social science and their counterparts in Japan and South Korea.

More precisely, we address the following issues. First, there is a puzzling discrepancy between scientific dependency in terms of academic training on the one hand, and citation on the other. To put it differently: many East Asian scholars have studied in American institutions or have been otherwise influenced by American fields of social science; yet this has not resulted in obvious intellectual dependency in terms of references: Japanese and South Korean scholars refer first to their respective fellow-national colleagues and to European social scientists, and only thereafter to North American social sciences. These findings significantly differ from case studies where the dependency of the Global South towards the Global North – and especially North American social sciences and humanities – appears stronger (see, among others, Alatas 2003, 2006; Canagarajah 2002).

Second, Asian social scientists refer to Western works in a significantly different fashion: citations of North American authors are more often orthodox, that is to say, non-critical and in line with the asymmetric patterns of global scientific relations; whereas European works of social science tend to be more often used to critically reassess these very asymmetries . In short, reference to Western sociology and political science in Asia can be both a sign of the systemic dominance of the West and a resource to put such dominance into question.

We argue that the logics of this dual reception cannot be understood without taking into account how national academic and scientific fields shape the acclimation of social sciences. We follow Bourdieu’s claim that it is necessary to take power relations within these fields into account to grasp the structure of the international circulation of ideas (Bourdieu 1999). Moreover, we complement this field-centred analysis at the national scale with a world-system analysis of the international exchange of social sciences. In the past fifty years, world-system analysis has developed as a general method to explain, through a transnational and relational lens, a variety of economic, social and political phenomena taking place at the national, regional, or local level (Wallerstein 1979). Its first expression stems from a re-interpretation of unequal economic exchanges between the so-called “First World” and “Third World” countries: for Wallerstein and other world -system analysts, the current capitalist economy could not have existed and prospered without the international division of labor between core and peripheral regions. Analogies and modifications to this core -periphery model have been made in order to analyse the transnationalization of culture (De Swaan 1998; Heilbron 2001), the social sciences (Heilbron et al. 2008; Beigel 2010; Keim 2010), and the humanities (Bennett 2014). Most of these contributions stress the fact that in cultural or scientific world-systems, cores and peripheries are not static, with variations occurring in terms of domains, disciplines and professional fields. Moreover, contrary to the economic realm, many cores can co-exist in global cultural or scientific spaces.

Our paper allows gaining a better understanding of these notions. It shows that a strong division of scientific labor existed at least until the 1970s between core and peripheral countries. In core countries, scientists aimed at formulating theoretical and nomothetic propositions, whereas in peripheral countries, they studied cultures and built case studies in an idiographic fashion (Alatas 2003; Pletsch 1981; Wallerstein et al. 1996). Yet this geography of scientific cultures and practices has become more complex in recent decades. Peripheral positions in the world -system of social sciences can be defined in significantly different ways. Keim has suggested that the underdevelopment of academic infrastructures, intellectual and cognitive dependency, and marginality in terms of international recognition should be clearly distinguished. If some countries (and institutions) can be peripheral in all these dimensions, others are peripheral in only one or two of them (Keim 2010). These differences in the periphery itself call for a more accurate characterization of the core -periphery model and the addition of a third category, as Wallerstein himself did when he studied the capitalist world-economy. Our paper argues, along this line, that the current position of East Asian sociology in the global system should be accounted for in terms of its semi-peripheral status, since it is neither fully central nor fully peripheral. Asian research infrastructures and communities are stronger and more dynamic than in many other countries of the Global South. Yet, at the cognitive level, Japanese and South Korean social sciences aim neither at being universal, nor at simply importing theoretical references for purely empirical research. Rather, their in-between position allows them to adapt and reframe central references, and eventually to use them in a counter-hegemonic fashion.

Orthodox and Critical Western References in Japan

Japan was one of the first non-Western countries to modernize successfully. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it showed that non-European people could catch up with Europe . As scholars and politicians came from all over the world to study Japan (Roussillon 2005; Aydin 2007), they stressed the role Western knowledge had played in the process of modernization. Indeed, Japan reached international recognition and resisted imperial encroachments because it had been able to use what had made the West dominant. Social sciences were a crucial part of this new apparatus: they gave the Japanese an enhanced ability to understand and control society and politics, and therefore to build a powerful nation.

This early modernization has placed Japan in an ambivalent position. Its power is ultimately premised on a body of knowledge imported from the epistemic and political centre of the world-system . At the same time, Japan became a model to emulate; many countries wishing to modernize drew on its experience. It can thus be described as a periphery in the centre or a centre in the periphery. In addition, the social sciences in Japan had various and sometimes opposite functions. They strengthened imperial designs as well as fuelled anti-systemic movements. Japan’s importation of the social sciences must therefore be addressed with regard to its shifting global positioning and the diversity of the political and intellectual understandings of Western texts available there.

To understand the social sciences in Japan, we suggest that it is necessary to differentiate orthodox and critical social sciences. Orthodox social sciences consist in the body of knowledge instrumental in the development of the modern Nation-State and global capitalist exchanges, whereas critical social sciences have allowed for critical reassessments of the power relations that sustain these very political and economic frames. Arguably the difference is ideal-typical and often not as clear-cut as it may seem. But the difference remains heuristically sound and allows for a better understanding of the various importations of Western scientific references in Japan.

Institutionalizing the Social Sciences in Japan

European social sciences were introduced in Japan as the country integrated into the economic and political world system in the second half of the nineteenth century. Reversing more than two centuries of official seclusion – even though Japanese leaders had been careful enough to closely monitor European scientific progress (Bellah 2003) – Emperor Meiji (r. 1868–1912) embarked on a wholesale process of Westernization of Japan. The Emperor encouraged his subjects to “seek knowledge all over the world”, and Japanese scholars and politicians began systematically to tour important relevant centers of knowledge across the world. Following the Iwakura Mission (1871–1873), thousands of students were dispatched to the West to acquire Western languages and concepts of science, as well as to translate the main scientific/political texts. On their return to Japan, they set up the institutions that were to modernize the country (Kunitake 2009). Imperial Universities were founded (starting with the University of Tokyo, Todai, in 1886) and soon complemented by private universities. European disciplines, among them sociology, were quickly incorporated into the new curricula.

Early on, translators struggled to create a new word that would convey all the nuances of the idea of “social” that had been acquired from the European languages in tandem with the modern scientific and political revolutions (Heilbron et al. 1998). As the terms shakai (society) and shakaigaku (sociology) gained official currency in the 1890s, the translations of Western theorists and sociologists helped the Japanese acclimate to a radically new view of what the Japanese had previously known under the loose label of gun (collectivity). Western “experts” (such as Fenollosa, who taught American-styled sociology and political economy at the University of Tokyo from 1877) were soon joined by local scholars who had been trained abroad (Masakazu Toyama, who had studied in England and in the USA, and was a specialist on Spencer, became the first officially appointed Japanese sociologist at Todai in 1893). In just a few decades, Western sociology became an established body of knowledge in Japanese universities. A Japanese Sociological Association was created in 1924 (Usui 2006). As with other social sciences – such as folklore and ethnology, or philosophy (Inaga 2013) – the main source of inspiration was from Germany, even though British-American and French sociologies also had an important influence. Since Germany was regarded as a late modernizer, similar to Japan, and also because German authors allowed for a broad range of scientific and political questioning (see below), their influence on Japanese social sciences went beyond any other until 1945 (Barshay 2007).

In many respects, the Japanese case seems to follow a pattern similar to the one many other non-Western people experienced. As the West was then at the center of global power relations, it was paradoxical that other countries had to Westernize if they were to resist Westernization . Science was a central component of this transformation. Yet Japan was a special case among non-Western countries, for it was considered the only such country to have fully modernized by the beginning of the twentieth century. This had at least two consequences. First, the scope and the depth of the importation of social sciences was remarkable. Not only were the social sciences seen as a tool for the modernization of the state and the nation; they also allowed for a radical critique of the power structures of modernity (at least until the military began repressing dissenting voices in 1937). The success of the spread of the German social sciences, for instance, can be explained because they provided orthodox (that is to say valuable technically-oriented insights for Japanese officials involved in a Bismarckian-styled process of nation building) and, at the same time, critical resources for Marxist intellectuals (Lie 1996).

Second, whereas Japan had been on the verge of being colonized in the 1860s, it managed to become an imperialist power just a few decades later. By administrating large parts of Asia , Japan contributed to the diffusion of European knowledge: Japanese Imperial universities opened in Seoul (1924) and Taiwan (1928), and Western texts translated by Japanese scholars became sources of inspiration for the Korean and the Chinese intelligentsia. Moreover, the social sciences were fully instrumental in colonial projects (Moore 2013) because they helped to categorize the populations and legitimize Japanese rule. Knowledge and power became closely linked, for the former was the source of political, military, and economic power. Knowledge granted Japan a central place in the world -system and proved so efficient that the pre-war scientific networks were reactivated to reshape Japan’s prosperity after 1945 (Mizuno 2010).

The early institutionalization of Western social sciences in Japan, in sum, was a global, but ambivalent process. European knowledge stood, first, for a Western-centred global system. But it was also central to Japan’s attempt to build a modern nation and to gain preeminence in this very international system. Finally, such knowledge was decisively associated with the political hope of building an alternative political system to the modern-capitalist one. Domination and emancipation, nationalism and internationalism : social sciences in Japan were at the intersection of various and partly antithetical projects of global modernity. 1945 was only a partial break with the past, as these trends have continued to shape the Japanese reception and interpretation of Western social sciences until today.

Japanese and North American Social Sciences After 1945

After 1945, Japan was quickly reintegrated into the world -system under American occupation. American social sciences therefore replaced the European ones, though without fully dislodging them (some disciplines, such as philosophy , have remained German-influenced). Moreover, the patterns of importation set up before 1945 were still active: the diffusion of the social sciences continued to be shaped at the intersection of national and international constraints, and by the tension between state-oriented expectations and critical functions.

This intertwining of the international and national scales has framed one of the main patterns of importation: Japan has rebuilt as a nation by extensively borrowing from the American social sciences. Explaining the rise of Japanese fascism and imperialism, but also reconstructing a modern and democratic society, implied using theoretical tools that the Americans readily supplied. The main intellectual figures of this period, such as Maruyama Masao, who had been trained in German social sciences before the war, began endorsing American liberal theories (Hiraishi 2003). American Anthropology, likewise, replaced European theories, as many young Japanese graduates were hired to carry out sociological surveys and provide data for the occupying forces. These graduates soon after established the field of Japanese Studies, where their cultural approach helped to frame a sense of Japan as a homogeneous community, but also as an imperfectly modern country.

The importation of American social sciences gained momentum because they offered “modernizing expertise”. Modernization theories, which were part of American Cold War policies (Berger 2003), found in Japan a very fertile ground. Even at the end of the 1960s, when they had basically lost all credibility in America (Gilman 2007), such theories continued to have a huge influence in Japan, where the number of sociological articles on Talcott Parsons – the main figure of the school – regularly increased during the next decades (Fig. 12.1).

Fig. 12.1
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Articles on Talcott Parsons in sociological Journals (1970–2000) (Source: Japanese Sociological Association Database)

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Not all these articles were positive, but even when they criticized Parsons they showed the continuing relevance of the capitalist-modernization question in Japan. The fact that the Japanese GDP kept on expanding until the 1990s (Palat 1993) partially accounted for this rise in the number of references to Parsons. But Japan’s position in global economic exchanges is not the sole explanation. The structuring of the national scientific fields on American lines is equally important. In the 1960s, the acclimation of the modernist scientific apparatus reached a new threshold, with more students entering the academy (from 65,954 in 1959 to 95,026 ten years later) and contributing to further diffusing the social sciences. The nationalization of transnational social sciences was a successful process in Japan, as the country developed largely autonomous scientific fields. Until the 2000s many Japanese social scientists interacted mostly with their Japanese colleagues and wrote in Japanese only (as the density of local scientific interactions was sufficient), but doing so they relied on questions and references that were originally mainly American (Okamoto 2010).

The intricacy of the national and transnational levels appears clearly if we look at the research topics tackled by Japanese scholars. Some topics became central because they had a special relevance at the national level (for instance, the question of migration , as Japan opened up to international migration at the end of the 1980s). Other topics received similar scrutiny, as they were constructed as “national social problems”. While Japan entered the murky waters of neo-liberal policies, the number of articles on inequalities almost quadrupled between the 1980s and the 1990s, and doubled in the next decade as did articles on poverty (with a twofold increase in the same decades). The question of ageing, which was rarely touched upon in social science publications until the 1980s, became a pressing topic, too, as the Japanese population became one of the oldest in the world. As the social sciences continued to expand (the number of PhD candidates rose from 2654 in 1990 to 6195 in 2000), and the research content came to reflect questions internal to Japanese society. Yet this localization of knowledge does not mean that Japan shut itself off from international influences. On the contrary, these two trends were mutually constitutive.

One may gain a better understanding of this process by scrutinizing how questions surrounding the situation of women in Japan were tackled in the social scientific literature . Such questions have long been debated in Japan thanks to a strong critical feminist movement. But in the 1990s, as deep inequalities remained between men and women, even conservative politicians began to stress the detrimental effect of this situation of workplace inequality on the Japanese economy, prompting a renewed attention to the problem. Yet, paradoxically, the number of articles with the keyword “women” decreased during these years. In fact, this trend is merely indicative of the fact that Japanese scholars have been catching up with the transformations of American social sciences. Questions about women have been replaced by questions about gender (the increase of articles with the keyword “gender” in Japan has more than compensated for the decrease of studies on women/feminism ). Hence questions about women that had roots in national political debates came to be rephrased in the vocabulary of global American gender studies (Marx Ferree and Tripp 2006).

Critical Uses of European Social Sciences

But social sciences concurrently provided critical resources. Radical intellectuals quickly re-organized after the war. The Democratic frame of the American occupation paradoxically gave intellectuals the opportunity to develop a harsh critique of the capitalist order. Critical social sciences have thus seen a second pattern of circulation between the West and Japan. The critical social sciences have a more ambiguous place, though, as they are embedded in and subversive of the world-systemic relations. This contradiction became more decisive in the 1960s when the Japanese Communist Party came under harsh criticism from left-wing intellectuals for its support of the USSR . These intellectuals stressed the lingering Stalinism and the anti-intellectual bias of a Japanese Marxism that was more dogma than scientific tool. They noticed that, for all their differences, Japanese Marxism and Modernization Theories had one thing in common: both assumed that Japan was an imperfect modernizer (Harootunian 2000) and they had consequently failed to serve as tools of analysis of what Japan really was. Doing so, these intellectuals critical of orthodox Marxist carved a space for a reflexive use of social sciences. The end of the 1960s also brought major political changes that weakened the influence Marxism intellectuals and American-styled Modernizers had enjoyed since 1945 (Kersten 2009). Anti-systemic protests developed, targeting the US and the Soviet dominance alike, and opened up a new phase of geo-cultural relations.

In this context, the importation of alternative (especially European) social sciences, gained momentum. This did not mean that the American channels of importation ceased to exist, but rather, that other references managed to circulate and to challenge the structure from the inside. The reception of Michel Foucault can help us gain a better understanding of this process.

As Fig. 12.2 shows, Michel Foucault was introduced at three different time periods. In the 1970s, with the first translations of his works, Foucault became associated with a new wave of European post-structural thinkers. Then, his death in 1984 prompted a second round of translations (1985–1991). During both these periods, importation of his work was premised on two intertwining networks. The first one was political: Foucault was seen as a major theoretician of the renewal of Marxism in the aforementioned anti-systemic fashion. When Foucault travelled to Japan in 1978, Yoshimoto Takaaki, a highly influential scholar of the Japanese New Left, interviewed him. Moreover, Foucault’s fate in Japan was linked to the network of his translators: they were French-speaking scholars who belonged to French departments, more than to philosophy departments (still dominated by German-speaking philosophers). His early reception was that of a semi-outsider; it occurred outside major academic departments and political trends. Yet this semi-marginality was also the condition for Foucault’s fame: a critic of the apparatus of European modernity, his Japanese readers appropriated him for the theoretical possibilities he offered to challenge this very modern apparatus in Japan.

Fig. 12.2
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Articles on Michel Foucault in sociological Journals (1970–2000) (Source: Japanese academic libraries statistics)

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The third instance of Foucault’s reception took place in the first decade of the 2000s. This was partly linked to the release of several unpublished texts in French. But this new interest was more decisively sparked by the numerous contacts that had taken place, from the 1990s on, between Japanese and American academia. In that decade, the number of Japanese studying in the US reached an historical peak (50,000 each year on average). Likewise, the number of Japanese scholars who travelled abroad for academic purposes rose from 33,380 in 1993 to 165,569 in 2012 (roughly 20% of them to the US). In the fields of the social sciences and the humanities , these scholars brought back home the main American references, which, for many of them, turned out to be French post-structuralist ones (Cusset 2008). Foucault’s reception in Japan became, to a large extent, an American reception (there are respectively 147, 127 and 124 titles on Foucault in English , French and Japanese in Japan’s academic libraries).

Anti-systemic trends in the global circulation of the social sciences, then, are not disconnected from mainstream ones: English and North American universities have shaped the scientific world system as well as provided the resources to put such a system into question. On the one hand, the structure of scientific exchanges shows a robust continuity in the longue durée since the post-Meiji period: European and American social sciences have framed the scientific apparatus of Japan. They have allowed the country to become a modern nation and a major regional/international player in a context of globalization (Sasaki 2011). In 2015, the first five destinations for Japanese scholars abroad were the US (21 per cent), China (9.8), Korea (9.5), Germany (5.5) and France (4.7), showing the stability of Japanese-Western exchanges, as expressed by the dominance of the US and the continuing relevance of the European countries Japan has been historically linked with. But the figures also show the capacity for Japan to re-position itself as an alternative global center in Asia (Befu and Guichard-Anguis 2001), where it acts as a scientific hegemon. This trend has been instrumental in the development of regional connections, where “Asianization” is meant to provide Asian scholars with alternative indigenous tools to decipher their societies (Alatas 2006). Yet Japan has somewhat reluctantly endorsed the role of hegemon reminiscent of its imperial past. While more conservative-minded scholars such as the legal specialists have participated in the diffusion of Japanese norms in Asia (Giraudou 2009), Japanese sociologists have been more cautious. This does not mean that they have not developed strong regional ties with their colleagues but, rather, that they have stuck to a universal concept of science and a political critique in line with Left-wing ideologies.

On the other hand, these global relations have made it possible for anti-systemic trends to develop. Not only did an originally European Marxist tradition take root in Japan almost as soon as the country was integrating into the world economy, but Japanese intellectuals have continued to use European social sciences until today to critically reassess the power relations of the world system. The strong dependency on American social sciences since 1945 has complicated these alternative exchanges, but did not put an end to them. On the contrary, as North American universities became world centers of radical thinking, they promoted the global dissemination of a new brand of counter-hegemonic theories. Many Japanese scholars have conducted research in the United States in the last few decades and this has facilitated the critical appropriation of Western social sciences by non-Western intellectuals. Western social sciences, in this respect, have been tools to deconstruct the very hegemony that made them global.

Western Social Sciences in South Korea

In South Korea, as in many other Asian and non-Western countries, the institutionalization of social sciences cannot be separated from the influence of Western modes of thinking.Footnote 1 In the nineteenth century, European texts circulated among members of the Korean elites through Chinese translations. Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Benjamin Kidd were among the first authors to be translated. Yet, after China’s defeat in the Opium Wars, Korea adopted an isolationist policy that officially prevented the introduction of Western thinking and technology. But at the end of the century, Korean reformists and/or nationalists borrowed from those Western thinkers whose texts had been translated into Japanese. The colonization of the Korean peninsula by Japan between 1910 and 1945 resulted in the further introduction of social thought from Europe , especially from Germany, through Japanese channels. Numerous terms of Western social sciences, still in use today in Korea, came into existence after having been translated into Japanese between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century.

The first course in social science was created at Seoul Imperial University, which was the only institution of higher education in Korea under Japanese rule, as the Japanese Governor strictly controlled the education of Korean elites. In Seoul Imperial University Korean students were a minority accounting for twenty to thirty percent of the students. Korean elite families or American missionaries also created a few private colleges – eighteen of them existed in 1943. If some Korean scholars had been trained in Europe and the United States, most of their publications consisted of handbooks and offered translations of classical authors from the European tradition of social thought. The first course of sociology was created at Seoul Imperial University in 1927 and was delivered by a Japanese professor, while two other courses were given in private universities.

The situation changed slowly at the end of the Second World War. Under the United States Army Military Government (1945–1948), Seoul Imperial University became Seoul National University (SNU). A Law Faculty was created. Economics, sociology, and political science were recognized as disciplines and became part of the Faculty of Humanities, along with philosophy and literature . Between 1945 and 1959, sociology departments were created in three other universities. Seventeen departments of economics and sixteen departments of political science were founded during the same period.

The increase in the number of social science academics resulted in the creation of various professional associations and national journals relevant to the new disciplines (see Table 12.1) (Kim 2015a, c). In this context, sociology was institutionalized a few years after economics and political science. When it was founded in 1957 the Korean Sociological Association had only seventeen members (Shin and Han 2010). Consolidation continued until the 1970s. The Korean Social Science Research Council was created in 1976 and connected several disciplinary associations. One year earlier, a Social Science Faculty had been created at SNU, with ten departments. As SNU was the most prestigious university in the higher education system of South Korea, its institutional settings were reproduced and directly influenced the orientation of other universities. In the mid-1970s the perimeter of the social sciences thus became stabilized nationally. All these changes tended to institutionalize the difference between the social sciences and the humanities.

Table 12.1 South Korean Social Science Associations and Academic Journals (year of creation)
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The number of students and faculty members began significantly growing from the 1970s on. Three educational reforms in 1979, 1980, and 1995 opened up the higher education system. South Korea had 189 universities in 2015, compared to 72 in 1975.Footnote 2 There were almost twelve times more students of the social sciences in 2014 than in 1971. They accounted for 25.7 percent of the total students at university level. This group is the most significant in terms of student numbers of the academic fields ahead of Law , and the Natural Sciences.Footnote 3 The number of social science faculty members has also risen accordingly, from 219 in 1970 to 2505 in 2010. There were 33 Economics departments in 1970, but by 2000 there were 150, and in that year there were 64 Political Science and International Politics departments and 42 Sociology departments (see Table 12.2), with Sociology growing faster than other disciplines since the 1970s.

Table 12.2 Evolution of the number of social science Departments
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The increase in the number of social science faculty and students in Korean universities has impinged on the structuring of the research fields. Disciplines have organized and become autonomous communities. The demise of the authoritarian military regime in 1985 enhanced the freedom of research and speech and made new fields of inquiry possible. The publishing market also opened up at the same time, allowing for the translation of foreign books. The educational reform of 1995 resulted in a rapid increase in the number of Master and Doctoral students in all disciplines. Most academic journals of the Social Sciences now publish four issues a year (as opposed to one or two in earlier years).

Parallel to this process of institutionalization , professionalization and growth, at the end of the 1990s the authorities implemented policies promoting the internationalization of South Korean Social Sciences. The political context of the early 1990s paved the way for comparative research on the political transitions that were simultaneously taking place in other regions of the world. NGOs also contributed to introducing new research topics that were on the international agenda, such as human rights, gender studies, global peace, environment, and criminal justice. South Korean social scientists were asked to tackle research questions that went beyond the usual national framing of their analyses. Funding agencies signed agreements with their foreign counterparts such as the Humboldt Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, with the aim of allowing South Korean students to travel abroad for their research and to participate in international conferences (Shin and Han 2010). Academic courses in English developed, as well as incentives for Korean social scientists to publish in English-speaking journals. Some Korean journals began publishing in English whole or partial volumes. The Korean Political Science Review, the Korean Economic Review, and the Korean Journal of Sociology publish two issues a year in English , while the Korean Social Science Research Council publishes its own journal in English.

Another sign of the growing internationalization of Korean social sciences can be found in the number of journals that are included in the list of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) (Shin 2007). In 2015, among East Asian countries, South Korea had the highest number of journals just ahead of Japan and China (see Table 12.3).Footnote 4 , Footnote 5 It is in this general context of internationalization that the place of Western references can be assessed.

Table 12.3 Number of social science journals registered in SSCI
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Western References in the Social Sciences and the Humanities

Drawing on the KCI, a Korean Journal Database produced by the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, we have compiled references to more than twenty classical sociologists and theoreticians between 2004 and 2016.Footnote 6 Across the journals,Footnote 7 Marx is the most cited author ahead of Foucault, Weber, Habermas, Bourdieu, Mauss, Durkheim, Rawls, and Spencer. Gramsci, Giddens and Tocqueville are cited less frequently, and US sociologists (Parsons, Merton, Coleman or Alexander) are quoted infrequently. Within sociological articles alone, Marx is still the most often quoted author before Weber, Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Foucault. Habermas and Giddens are mentioned four times less than Marx; other social scientists like Parsons, Merton, Tocqueville, Spencer, Honneth and Latour were cited fewer than ten times in thirteen years. Another inquiry into the articles published in the 2015 Korean edition of the Korean Journal of Sociology shows that references to foreign (51 per cent) and national authors (49 per cent) are almost equal (4 issues, 32 articles with an overall amount of 1852 references).

The importance of Western social scientists is confirmed when one looks at scientific books published in Korean. Statistics on the number of translated books in various fields of knowledge in 2014 show that more than 1400 foreign books in the social sciences were translated into Korean that year. Translations amounted for roughly 17.8 per cent of the total number of social science books published.Footnote 8

Two provisional observations must finally be made regarding the place of Western references in Korean social science journals and books. First, there are more incentives for younger social scientists to publish scientific articles in journals in the KCI or in the SSCI than as chapters in books if they wish to enter the field as their professional and to make a career within it. For those authors, publishing in English or in internationally referenced journals increases the likelihood of their quoting Western authors. In this general context, Economics and Business Administration journals are more open to citations of Western authors than are their sociology and political science counterparts. Secondly, in Sociology at least, European canonical authors are more often quoted than North Americans. At first sight, this last result may seem paradoxical since, post 1945, the United States has played a greater role than European countries in the building of Korean social sciences and in the training of Korean social scientists, including in Sociology.

The Prominent Role of the United States in Social Science Training

The United States Army Military Government played a fundamental role in the re-building of the South Korean education system after the Korean War. Only two per cent of the budget of this government was dedicated to education, but the funding had a strong impact. Universities attracted almost one third of the total amount of the budget for education and the re-building of SNU absorbed a significant part of it. Private philanthropic foundations (the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Korea-USA Foundation, the Asia Foundation) and US universities (Harvard University, The University of Minnesota) also took part in the structuring and development of the higher education and research system after the Korean War, through the funding of research centres, professional associations, journals and libraries. Between 1951 and 1967, despite restrictions on international travel, 7598 individuals studied abroad, 86 per cent of whom went to the United States. They were trained in the arts, humanities and social sciences and in engineering and the natural sciences.Footnote 9 Korean students favoured institutions that were already connected to Korean universities like the University of Minnesota for natural sciences, the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville for students in education, the East-West centre of the University of Hawaii in Asian studies or the Harvard-Yenching Institute for the social sciences (Yim 1998).

After restrictions on international travel were eased at the end of the 1980s, the number of Koreans getting their PhDs abroad rose rapidly (a fourfold increase from the 1970s to the 1980s, and a 2.4-fold increase from the 1980s to the 1990s). The US was still the favoured destination for more than fifty per cent of the doctoral students of all disciplines.Footnote 10 Japan came second, followed by China , the UK, Germany and France . China’s third position is the only change in this global hierarchy , since it did not attract Korean students before the end of the last century. While the US remains the main destination for Korean students getting their PhDs abroad, there is growing “Asianization”. That being said, the main destinations may vary from one discipline to the other (see Table 12.4). If we look at the exchanges between 1945 and 2013, China is more attractive for Economics than France and the UK . For Business Administration as well as for Political Science, the UK is more popular than Germany and France . Germany is chosen more often than the United States for Philosophy and Law . In Sociology, Korean students have been more attracted by Germany than they were by Japan and the United Kingdom even though the United States remains by far their first destination.

Table 12.4 Korean holders of a foreign PhD, by discipline and by country (1945–2013)
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Despite the number of foreign-trained Korean PhD students in the social sciences, they are only a minority of the PhD holders in the country today. Yet, the high value of their degree compensates for their small number. This value can be measured by taking into account their share in the staff of universities and researchers of various disciplines (See Fig. 12.3).

Fig. 12.3
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Share of foreign-trained Korean PhD holders among academics with a permanent position (percentage), 2001–2013 (Source: Annual Report of the Ministry of Education, Seoul, 2014; Statistics of Korea Higher Education Research Institute (KHEI): http://khei-khei.tistory.com (consultation in May 2016). Reconstituted data)

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Korean scholarly elites in the social sciences are still largely drawn from those with United States degrees. In Economics and Political Science scholars trained abroad accounted for more than seventy per cent of academic staff nationally in 2013 and almost the same percentage in Sociology.Footnote 11 In the most prestigious universities, members of social science faculties tend more often to have been trained abroad, especially in the US. More than ninety per cent of the professors in the top three leading faculties of the Korean social sciences (i.e. Economics, Political Science, Sociology in SNU, Yonsei University, and Korea University) obtained their doctoral degrees in US universities. Yet, except in Economics, their scientific publications remain mainly oriented towards discussing their Korean colleagues: as we have seen, the use of US scientific references remains secondary in Korean social science journals. How can we interpret this relative de-Americanization of US-trained Korean social scientists and sociologists?

The structure of US academic fields, first, partly explains why US-trained Korean social scientists do not extensively employ US references. While domestically they often hold a dominant position in their field and in Korean society, in the US professional scene they are marginal and face difficulties in producing research recognized as original (Kim 2015a). The most important incentives for their publications and their careers come from the academic and scientific fields in South Korea, which have been more national and autonomous , and they can critically assess Western influence. As noted earlier, US domination over Korean social science has been a constant concern for Korean researchers since the 1960s. During several post-war decades the problems and research questions regarded as legitimate were those shaped by North American paradigms. Korean Economics adopted the toolbox of neo-classical economics at an early stage. Sociologists were influenced by modernization theories (Kim 2007). Political scientists followed the political development model. Critical viewpoints began to appear only in the 1980s in the wake of challenges to the military regime. Researchers sought to better take account of the specificities of Korean culture and society.

The political division of Korea, the economic and political dependency of its Southern part and the history of the worker’s movement in the peninsula have been progressively taken into account by social science researchers. Other novel topics appeared in the 1990s such as labour, inequalities or gender issues, as well as questions related to the history of colonial Korea. In the decade following the end of the dictatorship , the academic community became more divided along political and epistemic lines between traditional social scientists and researchers who were critical of the conservative agenda and the US influences of mainstream social science practices in the country. Some professional associations were created in order to unify the various new progressive agendas such as the Korea Progressive Academy Council (1988). Internationalized researchers capable of importing research questions from the United States opposed others who feared a kind of ‘epistemic neo-colonialism’. The latter were more inclined to historicize research problems and to question the specificity of Korean society. This struggle has survived the political turmoil of the 1980s (Kim 2009). Korean social sciences are still divided between two poles, with the use of North American references being a sign of belonging to the “less Korean” of these two groups.

Controversies regularly stimulate debate over the intellectual identity of Korean social sciences. In a book published in 2006, the sociologist and public intellectual Hi-Yoen Cho argued that the sociology of Korean society should be made first and foremost by Korean sociologists and that their use of foreign concepts should only be premised on a deep understanding of foreign thinkers (Cho 2006). Kyung-Man Kim, a sociologist trained at the University of Chicago who teaches at Sogang University, argues a contrary position: that Korean social sciences do not have any specificity and are not essentially different from Western social sciences. Korean researchers should therefore not look for any national identity and, rather, should try to speak beyond their borders: “The only way to overcome dependence on Western academia,” he wrote, “is for scholars to withdraw from the temptations of the media and political power and bury themselves in research, to criticize the dominant agents of the global intellectual field and thereby engage them in dialogue” (Kim 2015b; Choi 2015).

These debates are triggered by the scientific policy of the Korean State. Complying with “global standards” of research has become the new official policy during the past decade. National funding agencies in science are evaluating journals, institutions, and researchers according to their number of publications included in the SSCI, the Science Citation Index, or the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Han and Kim 2017). Participation in multinational research projects is also an element for the evaluation of researchers. In this context of a state-driven race towards internationalization , resistance is growing among Korean social scientists, especially among those who have been trained in Korean universities. In the 2000s, research projects, international conferences and workshops, and exchange programs developed between East Asian countries including South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China , Hong Kong, and Singapore. Sociological associations from these countries meet on a regular basis. Incentives for internationalization have strengthened regional ties and may result in a progressive Asianization of the Korean social sciences (Chang 2014).

In this context, the use of European references has appeared both as an alternative way of internationalizing one’s research and as a critical resource against the domination of the US social sciences. References to the “French theory” and to French sociologists have been particularly useful in this respect as they allowed taking power relations and domination processes within Korean science and society into account and as an object of inquiry in itself. The dual logic of these relations to Western authors and references confirms Bourdieu’s insights about the role of the fields of reception in the international circulation of ideas. The Korean case shows the gap between the continued dominance of US Universities in the training of Korean academics and researchers on the one hand, and the resilience of European references, on the other. This gap can be explained when looking at the professional norms of the disciplinary fields of the Korean social sciences and the political impact of these references. The norms regarding entrance into those fields and regarding recognition as professionals are different from the norms regulating scientific exchanges within the fields. The first type of norms tends to select individuals who are familiar with US references, whereas the second favours more and more individuals critical of US scientific imperialism. Referring to European authors allows Korean sociologists to find a middle way between those contradictory injunctions.

Conclusion

Comparing South Korea and Japan is not an easy task. As was said before, each country has followed a unique path of scientific development, which makes any claim to lump them under a common categorisation dubious. We nonetheless believe that our theoretical approach – premised on Bourdieu’s concept of field and on a world-systemic perspective applied to global social science production and circulation – might allow us to draw some parallels. South Korea and Japan share, first, a relatively similar position in the global scientific exchanges vis-à-vis the West. Both had to import European sciences and have relied also on North American ones. Students’ and scholars’ exchanges in recent decades, as well as the hierarchy of theoretical references, show the abiding centrality of the West in the scientific world-system of the social sciences. In this respect, and taking into account other dimensions of their social science communities such as their size or their history, both South Korea and Japan share what we have called a semi-peripheral status.

Yet our survey shows that it is necessary to go beyond this characterization. Japanese and Korean scientific fields are relatively autonomous and have become fully national: academic and scientific interactions at the local level matter at least as much as references to Western central traditions and discourses. Yet there is a clear discrepancy between the Western training of many East Asian scholars and their propensity to actually refer to their Western colleagues: even though South Korean and (to a much lesser extent) Japanese academics have been trained abroad, they refer only selectively to North American and European social scientists.

If our empirical results do not allow us to account fully for this situation, we may nevertheless suggest some hypothetical explanations. In terms of a world-system analysis applied to social scientific production, these cases confirm the link between transnational exchanges and the emergence of nationally defined academic and scientific fields. The formation of autonomous and self-referential scientific disciplines in Korea or Japan is, in other words, an outcome of the global spread of Western social sciences, with these processes being two sides of the same coin.

Finally, to develop this hypothesis further would require a better characterization of the “semi-peripheral ” status of South Korea and Japan in sociology and the social sciences. In terms of scientific exchanges, such a position seems to accommodate partly contradictory trends. A number of recent case studies dealing with South American countries including Argentina and Chile, and with India, South Africa and Poland (Warczok and Zarycki 2014) and other Central and Eastern European countries (Bennett 2014) and with Israel, have all used the same category to describe the position of these countries in the world -system of some of the social sciences or the humanities.

Our analysis in terms of fields can be understood as an attempt to address the problems raised by the general scope of the world -system analysis. It offers a nuanced view of what is otherwise hypostasized under the broad label of South Korean or Japanese disciplines. We showed how opposite positions structure the fields and how these very oppositions account for the various ways East Asian scholars can tap – or not tap – into global scientific intellectual and cognitive resources. Some positions inside the Japanese or South Korean social sciences fields are “more peripheral” than others, whereas some are more inclined to be “central”. These positions, we believe, structure different scientific strategies, as scholars are more likely to play a national or an international card, not to mention the card of a counter-hegemonic Asianization of the social sciences (Chang 2014).

In sum, the logic and the evolutions of the field both shape, and are shaped by, various world-systemic structures, and can therefore allow us to gain a better understanding of the aforementioned ambivalence of the international position of South Korea and Japan in scientific exchanges. By doing so, we hope to have avoided the possible pitfalls of a too much ahistorical world-systemic approach: the relations South Korean and Japanese scholars have with the national, Asian or transnational scientific spaces are not given once and for all. The internationalization of the South Korean social sciences in the last two decades shows clearly that recent State-sponsored incentives have been as decisive for the evolution of the scientific production of the country as the semi -peripheral position since the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here again, field-level sociological and historical analyses usefully complement our understanding of global relations.