Seoul, Korea's Global City by Kyoung-Ho Shin Michael Timberlake

Author:Kyoung-Ho Shin, Michael Timberlake [Kyoung-Ho Shin, Michael Timberlake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Globalization, Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351347457
Google: Ns7nDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 49766335
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

4 Transnational communities in the Seoul metropolitan area

Introduction

With deepening globalization, the intensified flows of commodity and capital, information, knowledge, and people traveling across the national borders significantly impact on the process of immigration and formation of transnational communities (Castles 2002). Immigration is a major process where a new transnational political economy is observed at the global level of labor markets as well as the trans-local level of survival strategies by households (Sassen 2010). A few studies were made to examine in detail how transnational communities of ethnic minorities have developed under recent global influence, and to what extent global elements are embedded in business transactions and activities by transnational communities in the process of adaptation to mainstream society (Lee and Park 2008; Lin 1998). Those studies are the scholarly attempts to explain the global influences on urban changes in macro viewpoints. While studies about ethnic minority community in Seoul were accomplished mainly focusing on national identity and citizenship in legal terms, and multiculturalism (Choe 2006; Seol and Skrentny 2009), few to no studies were paying attention to how transnational communities were formed in the city and developed to adjust to locality, especially in their immigrants’ everyday life of business transactions in the contexts of globalization below. Immigrant ethnic entrepreneurs can be understood as grassroots actors of globalization because their transnational activities across national borders are interrelated with the pattern of settlement and flow between home and host country (Koh and Malecki 2016). Immigrant business activities are typical examples of local-based transnational connections between cities and globalization. Current knowledge on how immigrants in Seoul as an Asian global city create entrepreneurial activities, the types of business that they involve in and the outcomes of their involvements remain mostly primeval. This study explores transnational communities in Seoul focusing on the emerging entrepreneurial activities as a grounded globalization.

Globalization brought not only an increase of immigrants but also diversification of global movements of capital and labor, which has become a common trend today. Therefore, it is important to study transnational communities in terms of how or to what extent global forces are embedded in locality (Nederveen Pieterse 2004; Portes 2000). But, it is increasingly uneasy to separate global forces of capital culture, regional context, and peripheral locality. Of course, this study does not posit that global forces completely displace the local or regional contexts, or vice versa. Rather, it is believed that the city of Seoul experiences seeing the newly emerging regional-local interactions that hybridize with global capital culture (Suh et al. 2017). Therefore, this study considers significantly the ways of interaction and adjustment by transnational immigrant communities detailed in the business transactions of supplying and selling products, customer relations, and proportion, and social relations with mainstream society and among themselves in Seoul as an Asian global city. Given that, this study tries to offer a preliminary examination of transnational ethnic communities of a Korean Chinese immigrant community (Joseonjok village) in Garibong-dong and Daelim-dong, an Islamic community in Itaewon-dong, and a Mongolian community at Gwanghwi-dong in Seoul city.

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