Social Science Seminar - Strategic Adaptation and Asian Americans’ Permanent Socioeconomic Evolution, 1940 to 2018–2022
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Stereotypical images of Asian Americans have shifted from unassimilable aliens to the Model Minority, and Strategic Adaptation has been proposed as a key mechanism of their success. However, few studies have explored the origins and evolution of Strategic Adaptation and its relationship to changes in the socioeconomic status of Asian Americans. This study advances the theory of Strategic Adaptation by examining heterogeneous returns to education and compositional choices in education and labor markets, using census data, the American Community Survey, and the Current Population Survey from 1940 to 2018-2022. The findings reveal significant historical shifts in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) American (dis)advantage, characterized by multiple qualitative transformations and continuous quantitative changes, which we define as permanent evolution. Initially, CJK Americans experienced lower returns to education than Whites, but by the 21st century, they experienced higher returns. Analyses including all Asian ethnic groups yield the same findings. Strategic Adaptation began with immigrants and later spread to the second generation but not beyond.
Professor Kim is specialized in the areas of stratification, work and organizations, race and ethnicity, Asian American studies, Korea studies, and quantitative methodology. The common concern of his research is to contribute to the generation of the critical knowledge and information that will ultimately help policy makers to understand and eventually ameliorate the undesirable sources of increasing socioeconomic polarization in our society. Methodologically, he is interested in panel models and diverse statistical decompositions. His work appears, among others, in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Annual Review of Sociology, Sociology of Education, Sociological Methods & Research, Demography, and Korean Journal of Sociology.
Host: Prof Cameron CAMPBELL, Acting Dean, School of Humanities and Social Science, HKUST
Prof Yifan SHEN, Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science, HKUST