Research

Street-level bureaucrats are central actors for frontline implementation of social policy, yet the societal counterpart that carries policy into everyday collective practice remains less understood. This study develops the concept of street-level community, a meso-level intermediary connecting social policy to individual behavior. Although these communities are built to address daily lives, they worked as a main actor in implementing environmental policy. The analysis examines South Korea’s volume-based waste fee policy using a continuous difference-in-differences design and fixed effects models using national waste statistics from 1992 to 2022, together with key informant interviews and documents. Quantitative analysis show that regions with higher apartment shares experienced greater increases in recycling after the policy. Interviews and documents show how apartment communities carried policy into domestic routines through mutual visibility, locally crafted rules, and the labor of representatives and security guards. These findings underscore mediating role of street-level communities between frontline officials and residents. By translating policy into locally coordinated practices, these communities foster shared expectations and the capacity for collective action, providing both collective efficacy and a social foundation for implementing policy in everyday life.

The gap between environmental attitude (EA) and responsible environmental behavior (REB) is central in addressing environmental issues. However, limited attention has been paid to how structural conditions shape EA and REB. This study examines opportunity structures shaping REB by applying a spatial inequality framework to South Korea, using multivariate regression with national survey data. The findings indicate that although EA is relatively consistent, REB differs significantly across regions. Despite similar levels of EA, non-capital and rural regions exhibit lower levels of REB than capital and urban regions. These findings remain robust across different spatial categories and after controlling individual-level covariates using propensity score matching. These results indicate that individual-level factors alone cannot fully account for the observed disparities. Spatial inequalities in infrastructure, public policies, and the civic environment shape uneven opportunities for participation in REB. As a cumulative effect of uneven structure, citizens in rural and non-capital regions are not less willing but are often structurally constrained in their ability to participate in REB. The environmental behavior opportunity structure extends opportunity structure theory to prosocial behavior, and environmental justice research to everyday individual behavior. These findings underscore the necessity of government action to provide adequate structural support for widespread REB.

As the gender gap in unpaid labor narrows, where does convergence take hold, which tasks remain gendered, and how much of the work must still be supplied when time is scarce? Prior research documents uneven convergence across tasks, but whether it conceals work that cannot be deferred when the day is filled with paid work has drawn little attention. Using the 1999-2024 Korean Time Use Survey, we trace housework and childcare time among married adults aged 25 to 64. Results show that the historically large gender gap narrowed substantially but unevenly, with convergence concentrated in core housework. The ratio of women's to men's total housework fell from 14.6 in 1999 to 4.5 in 2024, while the childcare ratio fell from 6.2 to 2.4. Examining the timing of each activity across the day, we find that temporal dispersion does not track the extent to which a task is retained when paid work occupies much of the day. We introduce compressibility, defined as the share of an activity that is retained rather than deferred on a paid workday, and measured it as the residue and retention of time between those who did paid work and those who did not. On a paid workday, women retained 36 minutes of meal preparation to men's 5, holding 54% of their time against men's 24%. The non-deferaable residue of housework and childcare remianed with women, while men retained far less their own. This asymmetry showed little convergence between 2014 and 2024. Women continue to hold responsibility for domesitc work while men's contribution remains discretionary. Extending the differential convergence perspective, this study adds compressibility to temporal accounts of gender inequality and shows that convergence in volume can leave the distribution of responsibility intact. By showing how paid work constrains unpaid labor and who absorbs the work that cannot be deferred, compressibilty reveals how gender inequality is relationally constituted between paid work constraints and domestic responsibilities.

South Korea and Taiwan are among the countries with the world’s highest recycling rates, an achievement built on decades of household waste separation. Institutional theory on path dependency expects each country to reproduce its established organizational form in a new sector, a South Korea of large chaebol and a Taiwan of small and medium firms. The developmental-state literature adds that state coordination diverged across sectors, as some kept a developmental logic and others were liberalized. However, where, why, and how such divergence appears in a given domain remains an open question.

The recycling industry is a revealing case that inverts the arrangement each developmental state preferred before. In Taiwan reprocessing is concentrated among large firms such as Far Eastern and Formosa. In South Korea reprocessing remains dispersed across thousands of firms that average seven to eight workers, a size held for nearly three decades.

We trace the crossing through legislative and administrative records and national industrial statistics from 1988 to 2020. Korea began with a state fund and Taiwan with mandatory producer associations. Each arrangement then failed on its own terms, as Korea’s fund found no industry to build and Taiwan’s associations struggled to hold producers to a shared burden. These failures reopened who should coordinate recycling, and external conditions in the two countries diverged. In Taiwan democratization and a waste crisis strengthened the environmental agency, which built a central fund in 1997. In Korea liberalization after the 1997 financial crisis strengthened organized producers and pressed small recyclers, and the state released recycling to producer cooperatives in 2003. Each country arrived at the arrangement the other had left, and this crossing organized recycling against each national model.

The comparison refines how institutional accounts explain change. Such accounts emphasize an outside shock. Here the shock acts only alongside an endogenous failure. That failure of the dominant arrangement comes first and opens the contest, and the exogenous shock then works by strengthening particular incumbents or challengers already inside the field. This study develops a theory of both the onset of institutional change and its direction, and it shows how a new arrangement comes to coordinate a sector once the dominant way fails. The industry takes its shape from the interaction of endogenous failure and exogenous shock. The green transition is one domain where this interaction remakes national economic models.

How people evaluate artificial intelligence (AI) shapes whether they adopt, resist, or adapt to it, but these evaluations do not emerge in a vacuum. In societies where digital platforms already mediate most social relations, AI enters a pre-structured field in which actors occupy unequal positions within digital communication infrastructures and relational networks. Research on AI acceptance largely treats attitudes as individual cognitive responses, while sociological work that conceptualizes AI as a social structure rarely asks how differently positioned actors come to evaluate it. This paper reframes AI attitudes as positional valuations, shaped by where actors are located in digital and relational life. Using the SSK Panel Survey from South Korea, a highly digitized and platform-saturated society, I estimate hybrid panel models of two outcomes, AI valuation and perceived AI knowledge, across waves 8 through 10. Those more burdened by social media overload value AI more highly, whereas active producers on social media value it less even as they claim greater knowledge of it, a divergence a resource account of digital skill cannot generate. Valuation is higher among the relationally secure rather than the relationally deprived, and tracks the subjective quality of close ties rather than the frequency of contact, reversing the substitution thesis. Nearly all of these associations are between-person rather than within-person, indicating that AI attitudes reflect stable social positions rather than short-term experiential shifts. AI valuation, I conclude, is grounded in the existing orders of digital engagement and social relation that these technologies stand to reshape.

Robotic surgery has diffused rapidly despite weak clinical evidence and high cost, and adoption does not track the capacity to produce the technology. South Korea, which imports its systems and finances care through a universal National Health Insurance that sets prices administratively, is among the most intensive adopters in the world. This poses a puzzle, since a decommodifying system is restraining an expensive, evidence-thin procedure rather than accelerate it. The paper accounts for both sides of the market that forms around the procedure. A vignette survey experiment shows that patients facing quality uncertainty rely not on price but on judgment devices such as hospital tier and surgeon experience, and that they treat the same procedure as more singular as the stakes of the choice rise. The central contribution follows from this gradient. Singularity operates not only as a category of goods but as a variable intensity within one good, rising with the stakes of the decision, so that reliance on judgment devices relative to price grows stronger as severity rises. On the supply side, descriptive and documentary analysis shows that the fixed fee schedule holds covered margins below cost, leading hospitals to expand non-covered care, where robotic surgery is the highest-priced procedure. These findings show that price control does not eliminate the market for costly medical innovation. It redirects that market to the uncovered margins of universal coverage, where patient valuation and hospital incentives converge.

Carpooling illustrates that there are social solutions that can replace market solutions (Uber/Lyft/etc.) even within a market-centered society. However, we don’t know much about the choice process between social solutions and market solutions. This study investigates the construction of personal choice between the two domains in the case of carpooling, using a survey and a survey experiment. This study found that in-group friends are the primary source of carpooling. Survey experiments showed that mentioning group participation increases carpooling choice, and regression analysis confirmed that carpooling opportunity mediates the relationship between social activities and carpooling. There is an aspect of carpooling ‘chance’ that people do not explicitly think about but consider unconsciously when choosing transportation. Social solutions thus emerge as meaningful economic options shaped by existing social relationships. The implications of this research extend to both environmental sustainability and economic decision-making. A follow-up study using a conjoint experimental design is proposed to further examine these dynamics.