Volume 37, Issue 3

Prior research on the development of the welfare state in East Asia has mainly focused on domestic socioeconomic and cultural factors. This study analyzes the formation process of the Korean welfare state with special attention to global policy diffusion. Case studies on the two main areas of social policy, old age security and social assistance, show that recent welfare reforms in Korea have led to the emergence of a welfare state in terms of three criteria: state goals, principles of social provision, and universalism. This study demonstrates that the diffusion of welfare internationalism played an important role in the development of the welfare state in Korea, but also that policy diffusion produced differential welfare outcomes, depending on the relationship between state and society in varying phases. In the era of the developmental state, the principles and systems of the welfare state were formally and legally imported, but were not put into practice (“decoupling”). However, they were progressively implemented in the era of the people’s government (“coupling”). This study demonstrates that combining domestic and international factors can provide a fuller understanding of welfare state formation in a transitional society such as South Korea.

In the social scientific literature on the media coverage of science, the concept of “medialization” has become crucial in recent years. However, the concept exhibits several weaknesses, which are dealt with in this article: First, medialization remains conceptually hazy. Therefore, it is argued here that medialization implies a three-dimensional change in the media coverage of science, i.e. that it is assumed to be growing increasingly more extensive, pluralized, and controversial. Second, it is unclear whether medialization applies to all or only to some - and if so, to which - science topics. An empirical comparison of coverage on different science topics reveals that only some of them seem to be medialized, whereas others are only partially or not at all medialized. Third, medialization does not explain why some science topics become medialized and others do not. The article presents two models - agenda building and media constructivism - which may be able to answer this question.

All that is known about the effect of age on diminishing sports activity is almost entirely based on cross-sectional analyses which do not distinguish between the prevalence of athletic activity and its initiation and abandonment and which do not consider that individual sports behavior may change in different directions depending on the phase of life. This article examines the change in sports activity during the course of life, e. g. in a longitudinal perspective, differentiating between the prevalence as well as the initiation and abandonment of sports activity and, moreover, accounting for non-linear age effects. The analyses are based on the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, which has been conducted annually since 1984 with the same representatively chosen private households, which originally numbered to 6,000 households with more than 12,000 persons sixteen years of age and above. The results show that the universal differences in sports activity between the different age groups are mainly due not to age but to cohort differences: The tendency to take up an athletic activity at least on a weekly basis does, in fact, decline with increasing age but so, too, does an active person’s tendency to quit sports. Both life course related developments are only marginally linked to health and fitness; they can more easliy be explained by social changes in the course of life.

This article draws on ethnographic research with a group of 55 young male Muslim migrants in Frankfurt, Germany. As their Islamic background, their lives in Germany, and their criminal activity in the drug market create a constant area of conflict, the aim of this article is to give an account of the group’s self-constructions, techniques of neutralization, and coping mechanisms. Their distinct concept of purity and impurity, which has a major impact on their every-day lives (for example, in their choice between intra- or inter-confessional relationships and marriages as well as intra- and inter-ethnic ones) and on their decisions within the drug market (for example, in their choice of specific forms of violence, customers, business partners, and substances) will be analyzed in detail. The article shows not only that the behavior of drug dealers can be explained according to models of economic rationality and utilitarianism but also that the effects of cultural norms and values have to be taken into account as they influence and even impede the actions of the dealers. Their distinct concept of purity and impurity clearly distinguishes them from other drug dealers described in the literature. Moreover, this article illustrates how the group members constantly modify and adjust their concepts in order to meet the demands of their “Lebenswelt” (life world) in Germany and sustain the drug market over time.