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Previous studies as well as anecdotes have indicated that parental involvement in adult children’s marital conflicts is fairly common in Korea. This study attempts to explain how in-law conflicts – arguably a structural outcome of the traditional Confucian family – lead to marital disruption in contemporary families.

This study adopts the hypotheses of the corporate group, mother identity, and gendered-role expectations, which are instrumental to understanding the social context in which the legacy of the Confucian culture interacts with the knowledge-based neoliberal economy to revive in-law conflicts. Divorced-couple data are from in-depth interviews and court rulings, and their analysis illustrates the trajectories of marital breakdown.

The findings provide support for the hypotheses. Parents, especially mothers, who heavily invested time and money in their children’s education and career building meddle in their marriages in hopes to ensure the best returns to their investment. Normative prescriptions of gendered roles provide references for the parents regarding the roles of their children and children-in-law, and the gaps between their expectations and perceived reality trigger parental meddling and in-law conflicts. Adult children who are indebted to the parents for their status formation may acquiesce to the parental intervention.

In the traditional patriarchal family, in-law conflicts were restricted to mother- and daughter-in-law relationships, but are now extended to mother- and son-in-law relationships, reflecting a paradoxical twist in gender-role expectations. This chapter suggests that heavy parental investment in their children can have an unexpected consequence increasing the probability of adult children’s marital disruption.

A dual transportation analysis is considered as a strategic matter for plant facility expansion/contraction decision making in manufacturing operations. The primal-dual problem is presented in a generalized mathematical form. A practical technique of generating the dual solution is illustrated with a plant facility expansion/contraction example as a tutorial. Demand forecasting is performed based on the time series data with seasonal variation adjustments. The dual solution helps facilitate operations decision making by providing useful information.

An appropriate assessment of sustainability in venture business is an important managerial and investment decision making. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is utilized for sustainability assessment for venture business firms’ performance. Venture business firms are primary decision-making units (DMUs). Required information for this study is collected from Korea Listed Companies Association (KLCA) database. The proposed DEA model incorporates multiple inputs and outputs to assess the relative operational efficiency of the DMUs, identifying the best performance group among the peer venture business firms. The proposed model provides decision-makers with more accurate information for strategic insights to make better investment decisions in the competitive business environment.

Proper performance measurement is an important issue in library operational management. A data envelopment analysis (DEA) model is applied to evaluate the relative operational efficiency of 25 U.S. private research-university library members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Operations of each library decision-making unit are considered as a production process using four resource input and four service output variables. The model results are analyzed and compared with the efficient group and a peer group by using a t-test. The model provides decision-makers with more accurate information to implement better library services with appropriate resource allocation.

With their national economy rapidly and structurally turning away from the long-cherished stable employment regime since the national financial crisis, South Koreans’ poverty is increasingly manifested through financial entrapment ensuing from heavy personal indebtedness to banks, kin members and friends, and, the worst of all, private usurers. The world’s once most aggressively saving population turned into one of the world’s most indebted populations merely in a decade. Having lost its once-proud capacity of a developmental state, the South Korean government has instead been busy devising various public schemes for offering grassroots consumer loans in supposedly preferential terms. Consumer credit, instead of social wage, has been offered rather generously by this increasingly neoliberalized state. This is another crucial component of financialization in the contemporary world political economy. South Korea’s emergency measures for escaping the national financial crisis have paradoxically ended up transplanting the financial trouble from banks and industrial enterprises to grassroots households.

Although Korean sociology of sport is relatively unknown to the international community of scholars, it is a mature field in Korea. Sociology of sport was first introduced in Korea in the mid-1960s when the field first evolved in North America and Europe. However, the development of the field shows different aspects from its Western counterpart due to unique cultural and environmental factors both in academia and in society. There are three major research trends that form Korean sociology of sport. First, there is the research focus on the benefit of sport and physical activity by examining empirical data using quantitative methodologies. The second group of researchers pays attention to individual experience in diverse sport fields and utilize qualitative methodologies to investigate empirical or secondary data. The third and most recent trend is a critical approach that theoretically analyzes ideologies, power relations, and identity politics in sport and society. When looking at the future, there are problems and limitations within the field in Korea. These include lack of continuity in terms of conference sub-themes, over-production of doctoral degree graduates, conservatism rooted in the field, and a danger of regarding sport policy research as an exit for sport sociologists. However, there are also possibilities and reasons for optimism. The biggest possibility for Korean sociology of sport is globalization of the field. Another significant possibility is the need for sport sociologists in planning, developing, and evaluating sport policy. Finally, diversification of the field gives ample opportunities for future research.

By using ethnographic data and family interviews from eight families in Taipei, Taiwan, this paper aims to delineate how multigenerational families implement parents’ child-rearing values, and how these strategies vary by social class. The primary focus is the child’s mother and her relationship with other family members. I ask the following question: How does a mother in a three-generation family implement her ideal parenting values for her child while being encumbered by the constraints of her parents-in-law? Additionally, how does this intergenerational dynamic vary with family socioeconomic status? To conceptualize this process in such a complex context, I argue that we must understand parenting behaviors as acts of “doing family” and “intensive mothering.”

From 2008 to 2009, I conducted a pilot survey in two public elementary schools to recruit the parents of sixth-grade students. All eight cases of multigenerational families in this paper were selected randomly after being clustered by the parent’s highest education level and family income levels. This paper utilized the mothers’ interviews as the major source to analyze, while the interviews of other family members served as supplementary data.

Two cases, Mrs Lee and Mrs Su’s stories, were selected here to illustrate two distinctive approaches toward childrearing in multi-generational families. Results indicate that white-collar mothers in Taiwan hold the value of concerted cultivation and usually picture the concept of intensive mothering as their ideal image of parenthood. Yet, such an ideal and more westernized child-rearing philosophy often leads to tensions at home, particularly between the mother and the mother-in-law. Meanwhile, blue-collar mothers tend to collaborate with grandparents in sharing childcare responsibilities, and oftentimes experience friction over child discipline in terms of doing homework and material consumption.

Via this analysis of three-generation families in Taiwan, we are able to witness the struggle of contemporary motherhood in East Asia. This paper foregrounds the negotiations that these mothers undertake in defining ideal parenting and the ideal family. On the one hand, these mothers must encounter the new parenting culture, given that the cultural ideal of concerted cultivation has become a popular ideology. On the other hand, by playing the role of daughter-in-law, they must negotiate within the conventional, patriarchal family norms.