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Social Capital and Subjective Social Status: Heterogeneity within East Asia

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Abstract

Previous studies have documented the associations of objective class with either social capital or subjective social status, yet little attention has been paid to the direct connections between social capital and subjective social status. This study highlights social capital as an essential source of subjective social status, particularly in East Asia, whose member societies have shared similarities but also developed distinctive social and cultural contexts. We investigate how individuals differently perceive their own subjective social status by their social capital and hypothesize that such associations vary across four societies. By analyzing Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese samples of the 2012 East Asian Social Survey, we examine bonding, bridging, and cognitive dimensions of social capital and their connections to subjective perceptions of social status, after controlling for objective class measures. As hypothesized, the results underscore the varying patterns of the associations between social capital and subjective social status across four societies. For instance, individuals who develop wider social connections with people occupying high-status occupations tend to rank themselves higher on a subjective social-status scale in Chinese societies only, where social connections particularly play an important role. Having trustworthy relatives and friends is associated with higher subjective social status in Taiwan and Korea, where members are less tolerant of ambiguity than China. None of the social capital measures matters in Japan, the most individualistic society in East Asia. The findings of this study improve our understandings of subjective social status by emphasizing individuals’ embeddedness in social relationships and broader cultural contexts.

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Notes

  1. China is the first, Japan is the eleventh, South Korea is the twenty-eighth, and Taiwan is the fifty-seventh most populated in the world (United Nations Population Division 2020). China’s GDP is the second, Japan’s is the third, and Korea’s is the twelfth highest in the world (The World Bank 2018). National-level income inequality, the Gini coefficient, is relatively high for China (46.5 in 2016), moderate for Japan (37.9 in 2011), and relatively low in Korea and Taiwan (35.7 in 2016 or 33.6 in 2014, respectively) (Central Intelligence Agency 2020).

  2. China scores higher on Power Distance, taking power inequality between superiors and subordinates for granted, and scores lower on Uncertainty Avoidance, being tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, than Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Japan scores higher on individualism, prioritizing personal needs to collective benefits compared with China, Taiwan, and Korea.

  3. Families in East Asia are different from those in Europe and North America, emphasizing features such as extended family, coresidence, and strong family ties (Raymo et al. 2015).

  4. Such tendencies are also true for school alumnus and people from the same region, which are valid across the four societies (Bian and Ikeda 2016; Yi 2019). Two hypothetical individuals who graduated from the same prestigious university would be more likely to trust each other, even though they do not develop strong interpersonal relationships. They share similar cultural backgrounds and potential resources that can be mobilized for personal achievement. In Korea, such social connections are called yeon-jul, affective linkages developed based on members’ birthplaces or educational backgrounds (Yazawa 2006).

  5. Guanxi refers to social connections and networks, which has different dimensions and is widely utilized across time and societies. On the one hand, guanxi indicates a subset of relationships guided by the norms of reciprocity. On the other hand, in contemporary China, it means access to authority that helps obtain political or economic benefits through unethical and illegitimate routes (Chung and Hamilton 2001).

  6. We additionally conducted multiple imputations for Taiwanese and Japanese samples. The results of Taiwan remain the same as the results of imputed data; the results of Japan have some differences in statistical significance but not in substantial meanings. Some studies report that Japan not only has experiencing declining response rates to survey (Inaba 2007), but also has higher levels of missing data in surveys (Yamaoka 2008).

  7. The Cronbach’s alphas vary across the four samples. The scores of contact with people of high-status occupations are 0.69, 0.67, 0.60, and 0.55, and the scores of contact with people of low-status occupations are 0.55, 0.64, 0.49, and 0.59, for China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, respectively.

  8. We conducted sensitivity analyses with this variable as a categorical, which do not change our results presented in the next section.

  9. According to the supplementary analyses with five multiply imputed datasets (not presented), none of the social capital measures has statistically significant associations with subjective social status in M3 and M4 of Japan.

  10. We tested another model that additionally includes the membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in M4; CCP is closely related to social stratification in China (Bian et al. 2001). The main findings on social capital do not change, net of CCP membership. CCP membership itself is not significant for subjective social status.

  11. For instance, Taiwan is the most progressive in Asia, regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights. LGBT Global Acceptance Index, ranging from 1.6 to 8.9 among 174 countries, is the highest in Taiwan (5.7) among the four East Asian societies, followed by Korea and Japan (4.9), and the lowest in China (3.9) in 2014–2017 (Flore 2019).

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  1. Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Ji Hye Kim

  2. School of Criminology and Justice Studies, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA, USA

    Claire Seungeun Lee

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Kim, J.H., Lee, C.S. Social Capital and Subjective Social Status: Heterogeneity within East Asia. Soc Indic Res 154, 789–813 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02548-9

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