Sungkyun Lee

Sungkyun-Lee

Sungkyun Lee

Country of origin: South Korea Visiting period: April 2015-January 2016 Faculty sponsor: Rosemary Batt, Ph.D. Email: sl2667@cornell.edu

Background and Previous Experience

Sungkyun Lee is Professor of Sociology and Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Ulsan, South Korea. He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997, and in 2005, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Michigan.

His research interests include labor market analysis, social inequalities, and workfare policies, particularly within the East Asian context. The topic of his dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was A Comparative Study of Welfare Programs for Income Security in Korea and Taiwan. He is also the author of Economic Crisis and Labor Market Change in Korea (UOU Press, in Korean) and many articles including “Economic Change and Regional Development Disparities in the 1990s in Korea” (UNESCO, Korea Journal, in English).

Current Research at ILR

At the ILR School, Sungkyun Lee’s research will focus on social inequalities and labor market changes. One of his research projects focuses on the ways in which the increase of contingent workers in the labor market affects inequality issues. Contingent workers include provisional employees on a non-permanent basis, including temporary contract workers and part-timers. Because many companies have increased flexibility and agility to remain competitive in the market since the 1980s, contingent workers currently represent a substantial portion of the workforce in several countries, yet there are debates about the impact of the increase of contingent workers on inequality. While some scholars argue that the inequalities continue to increase for companies that hire a contingent workforce to reduce the labor cost, other researchers argue that the impact depends on occupations or industrial factors. The impact would depend on national legislations such as minimum income policy, tax policies, and workfare programs.  Thus, Sungkyun Lee plans to examine, based on quantitative and qualitative methods, the complexities and diversities of the causal relationships between employment change and inequalities. He also hopes his research at the ILR School in 2015 will provide him with the opportunity to develop a comparative project on social inequalities and labor market change within a global context.

-Sungkyun Lee