Stanford University

Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

Jong Jin Lee

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Jong Jin Lee is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at Shorenstein APARC for 2011.  Lee has been working for the Samsung Group since 1987.  Prior to joining Shorenstein APARC, Lee was a Vice President of Samsung Communications Team.  He has considerable background in the fields of Public Relations affairs, especially in the news media (newspaper, broadcasting, internet website, etc.).  He graduated from Korea University in Korea.

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Celebrating ten years of Korean studies at Stanford

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"I would like to invite my colleagues, students, friends, and supporters to celebrate what we have worked together to achieve over the last decade and I ask you all to join me in continuing this record of achievement in the decade to come."

Gi-Wook Shin
Stanford KSP Director
 

Gi-Wook Shin came from the University of California, Los Angeles to Stanford University in 2001 to establish a program in Korean studies. "Naturally, I had mixed feelings—of excitement and hope, but also of anxiety and uncertainty," says Shin. "Looking back, I made the right decision." The Stanford Korean Studies Program (KSP), today a thriving and vibrant program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC), recently held a series of major events to celebrate its tenth anniversary in February 2011.

Stanford KSP is unique among other Korean studies programs in its interdisciplinary, social science-based research focus on contemporary Korea. The U.S.-Korea relationship, particularly policy issues, is strongly emphasized in the program's research and publishing activities. Stanford KSP is instrumental in the success of Shorenstein APARC's two initiatives—the Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum and the New Beginnings policy study group—aimed at improving policy-making decisions in the two countries.

The program is grateful for the strong and generous support it has received from individuals, corporations, and foundations since the very beginning. In 1999, an endowment was established for the professorship that Shin holds, the Tong Yang, Korea Foundation, and Korea Stanford Alumni Chair of Korean Studies, which was followed closely by funding for two more Korea chairs. In 2004, Dr. Jeong H. and Cynthia Kim provided funding to establish a professorship named after former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry. Dr. Kim is President of Bell Labs at Alcatel-Lucent and a member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Advisory Board. A search is currently underway to fill this important position. The Korea Foundation then donated funds in 2005 to establish a third professorship, which is currently held by Yumi Moon of the Department of History.

Stanford KSP has successfully established two annual professional fellowship programs, the Pantech Fellowship for Mid-Career Professionals and the Koret Fellowship, something unparalleled by other Korean studies programs. The program's faculty, fellows, and visiting scholars—most of whom teach courses and speak at public events—greatly contribute to the intellectual vigor of the Stanford community. Paul Y. Chang, PhD '08, an assistant professor at Yonsei University's Underwood International College, says, "The program provided the ideal context to engage with passionate scholars and develop my research program."

Stanford KSP's visitors find themselves, in turn, rewarded by the experience of being at Shorenstein APARC. Former Korean Minister of Unification Jongseok Lee, a visiting scholar from 2008 to 2009, says, "While enjoying every bit of life at Stanford . . . I worked hard in the office from early morning to late evening, as if I were a graduate student preparing his final dissertation . . . It was a truly meaningful and memorable year." Stanford KSP maintains strong ties with its former students, fellows, visiting scholars, and other affiliates, in part through the Stanford Shorenstein APARC Forum in Korea, an organization that has grown since 2003 to boast a roster of over 100 members.

In addition to the interaction with Stanford KSP's faculty and visitors, Stanford students benefit greatly from numerous social science and language courses, internship and overseas seminar opportunities, and the ever-growing Korean-language library collection supported by the program. Social science courses cover such topics as the Korean economy, the politics of the Korean Peninsula, modern Korean history, and many others. Through the Stanford Language Center, students may take a rigorous, comprehensive offering of beginning- through advanced-level Korean-language courses. An internship program co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies provides students with the valuable opportunity to live and work in Korea each summer. Since its establishment in 2005, Stanford's Korean-language library collection has expanded to include a total of 41,300 print volumes and 13 electronic databases.

On an annual basis, Stanford KSP offers innovative and impactful programs addressing current, policy-relevant issues and events, as well as historical factors with contemporary relevance, that are shaping the future of the Korean Peninsula and the U.S.-Korea relationship. Conferences and workshops bring together leading Korea scholars with policymakers and other subject experts, including business leaders and international journalists, for productive and meaningful dialogue, research, and publishing activities. Stanford KSP's popular, long-time seminar series and special events afford members of the Stanford community and the general public the opportunity to listen to and engage with distinguished political figures and prominent scholars.

Stanford KSP celebrated its tenth anniversary on February 23 with a special public seminar examining the state and prospects of science, technology, and economics in Korea and Northeast Asia. The next day, it held its annual Koret Conference, a major event bringing together prominent Korea experts to discuss the future of North Korea. The anniversary activities concluded that evening with a dinner and reception to honor the generosity of Stanford KSP's long-time donors.

Proud of the program's accomplishments to date and optimistic about the future, Shin says, "I would like to invite my colleagues, students, friends, and supporters to celebrate what we have worked together to achieve over the last decade and I ask you all to join me in continuing this record of achievement in the decade to come."

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Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Stanford Korean Studies Program, delivered remarks at a dinner celebrating the program's tenth anniversary, February 24, 2011.
Rod Searcey
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Historical Sociology of Japanese Capitalism: Uncertainty, Justification, and Multiple Embeddings of Socio-Cultural Institutions

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As a sociologist who works on the conjunction and conflicts between political, economic and cultural-cognitive networks, Eiko Ikegami has been conducting research on long-term social processes that underlie and perpetuate modern Japanese social
relations with a number of different topics. It is from this long-term view point, that Ikegami offers a distinctive angle to articulate the grave difficulties that contemporary Japanese capitalism is facing. She expresses the social significance of the current radical transformation of Japanese capitalism as a historic turning point in redirecting institutions of Japanese trust and justification. For example, she investigates developments in popular consciousness of egalitarian views that clung to the myth that "we all are in the middle strata" and of distinctive gender roles closely linked to the particular style of Japanese capitalism. Ikegami considers these institutional transformations not only as a postwar product, but in a critical way as the result of path dependent developments of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization for more than a century. Using keywords such as uncertainty, networks, trust, and justification, her talk will present a bold synthesis that outlines the long-term process of institutionalization that produces mutually connected socio-cultural-cognitive systems in which the distinctive Japanese style of capitalism has been embedded.

Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Ikegami was a journalist for the Japan Economic Journal (Nikkei or Nihonkeizai Shinbun) before she moved to the US. Ikegami is currently Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research in New York. Ikegami's book, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1995), has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, and is widely considered the definitive statement on the subject. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005), won five book awards in various fields including the Distinguished Contribution Book award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the John Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, which cited the work as "the most important book on Japan to have appeared in recent years." In 2003, Ikegami was elected Chair of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the ASA.

Her core research interest has been related to the question: How did a non-Western society such as Japan achieve its own version of modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries? More recently, Ikegami has been working on three distinct areas of research: a project on trust and uncertainty in Japanese capitalism; the completion of a book project on the Gion Festival, Community, Gender, and Shrine in Kyoto; and, funded by the National Science Foundation, Ikegami currently leads a team of one dozen graduate students in conducting ethnographic research of online communities using 3-D virtual worlds in Japan and in the U.S. Ikegami’s theoretical interests uniquely combine culture and network concepts with the literature of civil society, which has prompted an initiative in the form of a series of workshops in Paris (Sciences Po) and New York, to study the trajectories of civil societies in non-western settings.

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Eiko Ikegami Professor and Chair, Sociology Department Speaker New School for Social Research
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Shorenstein APARC Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

Kenji E. Kushida

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Former Research Scholar, Japan Program
kenji_kushida_2.jpg MA, PhD
Kenji E. Kushida was a research scholar with the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2014 through January 2022. Prior to that at APARC, he was a Takahashi Research Associate in Japanese Studies (2011-14) and a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-11).
 
Kushida’s research and projects are focused on the following streams: 1) how politics and regulations shape the development and diffusion of Information Technology such as AI; 2) institutional underpinnings of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, 2) Japan's transforming political economy, 3) Japan's startup ecosystem, 4) the role of foreign multinational firms in Japan, 4) Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster. He spearheaded the Silicon Valley - New Japan project that brought together large Japanese firms and the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startup Ecosystem,” "How Politics and Market Dynamics Trapped Innovations in Japan’s Domestic 'Galapagos' Telecommunications Sector," “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).

Kushida has appeared in media including The New York Times, Washington Post, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Nikkei Business, Diamond Harvard Business Review, NHK, PBS NewsHour, and NPR. He is also a trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation, alumni of the Trilateral Commission David Rockefeller Fellows, and a member of the Mansfield Foundation Network for the Future. Kushida has written two general audience books in Japanese, entitled Biculturalism and the Japanese: Beyond English Linguistic Capabilities (Chuko Shinsho, 2006) and International Schools, an Introduction (Fusosha, 2008).

Kushida holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his MA in East Asian Studies and BAs in economics and East Asian Studies with Honors, all from Stanford University.

Global Green Cities of the 21st Century International Symposium

In cooperation with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and other organizations, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and its partners--Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, the LSE Cities program of the London School of Economics and Cisco--will be presenting the Global Green Cities of the 21st Century International Symposium in San Francisco, CA, from February 23-25, 2011.

Cities are at the epicenter of the global economy, and of the dramatic shift of population from rural to urban settings in many countries around the world. They are also at the heart of the transition to new, more sustainable economic models, as energy and other resources are used more efficiently, emissions are reduced, and the quality of life of their residents is enhanced.

This Symposium is a high-level, invitation-only exchange among a select group of the world's most innovative elected officials, planners, architects, academics and business leaders around the theme of sustainable urban development and the evolution of green cities. Its objective is to advance the state of the art in green urban design, based on the vision and shared experience of some of the world's most innovative leaders and places.

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