In my essay, I will aim to critically view South Korean culture using a few of Geert Hofstede’s 6 cultural dimensions (Power distance, Individualism, Feminine/Masculine, Uncertainty Avoidance, Longer Term Orientation and Restraint/Indulgence). Utilizing a case study done by Elena Buja, I will use these dimensions to critically view culture South Korea, using the United States as a contrast. I will not be making a direct compare and contrast, but rather using the United States as an example of a society that is/has been going through cultural change for a long time. In this way, I hope to highlight how Korea has changed culturally in a short amount of time. I choose to focus on South Korea due how fast it has grown economically and culturally over the past few decades. While South Korea continues to hold onto some of its (Confucian influenced) culturally aspects of the past, it also is heading head on into the modern world.
It is …show more content…
She does this by focusing on a novel called Please Look After Mom (엄마를부탁해) by author Kyung-Sook Shin. In this world-wide successful novel, Shin depicts old and modern South Korea in a series of flashbacks. The flashbacks are had by a mother of 5 grown children, suffering from Alzheimer’s, who gets lost after accidently being left behind by her family at a train station. With this novel, Buja could “find out how the Korean culture changed from the generation of the parents, who were young people after the Korean war (1950–1953) to that of their children, who are adults in present-day Korea, i.e. in a time span of about thirty-forty years, along the dimensions suggested by Hofstede (1991, 2010)”. With Shins work, we can begin to shed a little light on what has changed in Korea and what has stayed the same post Korean
It is …show more content…
She does this by focusing on a novel called Please Look After Mom (엄마를부탁해) by author Kyung-Sook Shin. In this world-wide successful novel, Shin depicts old and modern South Korea in a series of flashbacks. The flashbacks are had by a mother of 5 grown children, suffering from Alzheimer’s, who gets lost after accidently being left behind by her family at a train station. With this novel, Buja could “find out how the Korean culture changed from the generation of the parents, who were young people after the Korean war (1950–1953) to that of their children, who are adults in present-day Korea, i.e. in a time span of about thirty-forty years, along the dimensions suggested by Hofstede (1991, 2010)”. With Shins work, we can begin to shed a little light on what has changed in Korea and what has stayed the same post Korean