Suchergebnisse

Wide income inequality in a society has been associated with worse aggregate health. Regarding the relationship, often termed as 'the Wilkinson Hypothesis', a number of empirical findings and related systematic reviews have reached inconsistent conclusions. In addition, the Scandinavian welfare regime is expected to have better aggregate health indicators in comparison with the other welfare regimes. The expectation is largely based on the Wilkinson Hypothesis because the regime has relatively narrow income inequalities. Again, related empirical findings and systematic reviews have produced inconsistent conclusions. This article reports on two rounds of 'review of reviews' (RR) over six previous (systematic) review articles. The first round of RR found that the review articles reached divergent conclusions. The second round of RR over another set of three review articles also demonstrated that their conclusions did not reach a consensus. Neither the hypothesised Scandinavia's good health nor the Wilkinson Hypothesis was given solid empirical backing.

The case selection issue has long been neglected in cross-national welfare regime studies, despite its importance in securing validity and reliability. This article reviews thirty-three studies that produced their own welfare regime typology, and analyses their case selection practices. They can be divided into five groups in terms of their case sizes: from Esping-Andersen's (1990) original eighteen nations to 'all' nations. Three peculiar patterns can be observed in the approaches. First, more than two-thirds of studies still focus on the old set of eighteen nations, arguably ignoring emerging welfare states. Second, theoretical tension exists between 'isolationists' and 'expansionists' on the exportability of the welfare regime concept to wider cases. Lastly only a few studies have clarified and justified their case selections. It is concluded that the welfare modelling business needs to rectify the common practice of ignoring case selection issues.

Studies on politeness in Korean — an honorific-rich language like Japanese — have focused more on what Sohn (1995: 408) identifies as 'normative' (or discernment) politeness. Whilst these studies are illuminating, they have paid little attention to the 'dynamic' aspect of politeness. That is, they have focussed on 'static' or primarily dyadic interactions and have explored the speaker's discursive intention but paid minimal attention to the addressee's evaluation of certain utterances. The present study attempts to fill this gap by showing how multiple levels of politeness arise at 'situational, institutional, and societal levels' (Fairclough, 1989) in Korean institutional discourse. To this effect, it concentrates on the interaction between Korean Oriental medical doctors and their patients, which is a 'fruitful epistemological site' (Sunderland, 2004: 73) for the study of emerging and situated politeness in Korean. This is particularly so because in Korea traditional and Western medicine co-exist — Western medicine often being regarded as 'dominant' one — and consequently there is a 'dual medical authority' in Korean society. Employing Goffman's (1981) 'participation framework' and Davies and Harré's (1990, 1999) 'positioning theory', the present article demonstrates that the dual medical authority often obscures the 'speaker', 'addressee', and (im)politeness. of a speech act in patient–Oriental medical doctor interactions. An act that is apparently face-threatening at the situational level may not necessarily be face-threatening at the institutional level, where the 'real' addressee may be a non-present Western doctor or even Western biomedicine itself. The paper concludes that the dyadic, synchronic, and cross-sectional model of politeness on which most studies on Korean politeness rely is too simplistic and idealised. Instead, a multidimensional discursive approach to politeness should be adopted.

AbstractThe path‐breaking work of Gosta Esping‐Andersen (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, was based on 18 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) in 1980, and subsequently has been largely limited to 'advanced Western' OECD nations. However, this ignores much work on the East Asian welfare model (EAWM). This article aims to export the 'welfare modeling business' to East Asia in general and to Korea in particular. We search for articles in English or Korean which aim to classify Korea. We find 26 studies that are rather different in terms of concepts, measures and analysis. Korea seems to be a 'chameleon' changing its appearances to different viewers, with some support for almost every possible classification, apart from the social democratic regime. We find six possible types: liberal; conservative; hybrid; EAWM as the fourth regime; EAWM as a distinct regime; and underdeveloped. In addition, some studies suggest that Korea is moving too fast to enable a clear classification. The modal conclusion is of a fourth regime, but there are some differences between writers and over time, with scholars writing in Korean having a rather different view to scholars writing in English, and with early Korean writers placing Korea in the original triad, but later studies favouring a distinct world. We conclude that it is not clear whether the Western welfare modelling business can be successfully exported to other parts of the world without a change in strategy (concepts and measures).

AbstractThe Wilkinson hypothesis, which posits that it is income inequality, rather than economic growth, that determines population health in wealthy societies has been widely debated over decades. This article, with an original case selection process, retests the controversial hypothesis with the time‐series–cross‐section (TSCS) regression model. The main findings are that disposable income inequality is not statistically significantly associated with life expectancy, and its influences on the health of the elderly population are counterintuitively beneficial. Infant mortality rate is the only health indicator that both has the statistically significant association with income inequality and corresponds with the Wilkinson hypothesis. Finally, the relationship between income inequality and population health is not as simple as the hypothesis suggests and found to be dynamic and complex depending on what health indicator is used for the test.