"Family-Oriented Individualization" and Second Modernity An Analysis of Transnational Marriages in Korea

This paper examines individualization from the perspective of transnational marriage as a concrete historical tendency in Korea today. Transnational marriage involves global risks, individualization and cosmopolitan change identified by Beck as three major driving forces of second modernity. The research questions asked in this paper include: First, how do global risks work as a driving force pushing the state and the individuals toward transnational marriage? Second, how has the process of transnational marriage taken place on both the institutional and the individual level? Third, what are the salient characteristics of the relationship between individual and family in transnational marriages? To sharpen analytic foci, conceptual distinctions have been made between the objective-structural and the cultural-discursive dimensions as well as between push and pull factors of the transformation. The central claim we have developed in this paper is double-front: on the one hand, individualization in Korea seen from transnational marriage tends to converge with the Western pattern insofar as we see this from an eye of push factors of global significance. On the other, due to the difference in pull factors particularly at the cultural-discursive level, individualization does not proceed in the way as found in the West, but it rather encompasses a delicate, culture-bound balance between individual and family community. The concept of 'family-oriented individualization' embraces the aspects of dynamic balance between individualization and reactivating community as a dual process of historical change in East Asia.