• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.420-437
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• 1994

The starting point of the research is the relation between capital restructuring and urban restructuring. The economic restructuring, which has been caused by the economic crisis in the early 1970s in the United States has brought a spatial restructuring at different geographic scales. The degree of the success of urban restructuring is contingent to the local economic and political environments. The local contingent factor such as local politics should not be neglected for investigating the restructuring process. Through the case study of Chicago, the research provides two inconsistencies in applying the structural approach to the local level: first, the lack of the theoretical link between crisis and restructuring; and second, the crucial importance of local politics in shaping urban development.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.155-175
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• 1999

본 연구는 대구 섬유산업의 재구조화를 지역 내.외적 요인들의 관계적 관점에서 분석하고, 이에 기초하여 지역경제 발전전략의 정책적 함의를 도출하기 위해 수행되었다. 1970년대 이후 대구 섬유산업은 정부의 중화학공업 정책과 수출지향적 경제발전 정책에 힘입어 화학섬유 중심의 대량생산과 수출체제를 수립하였다. 노동력 공급의 부족현상이 나타남에 따라 노동력을 안정적으로 확보하기 위해 산업체 특별학급.부설학교와 섬유기술진흥원을 설립하였고 또한 기혼여성 노동력을 활용하기 시작하였다. 그리고 생산시설은 대구시 외곽지역에 집중적으로 입지하였다. 1980년대 중반 이후 대구 섬유산업은 국내.외 환경변화에 따라 구조전환을 시도하고 있다. 지역노동시장에서 저임금 노동력 확보가 어렵게 됨에 따라 자동섬유기계의 도입을 증대시키고 기혼여성과 외국인 노동력을 적극적으로 활용하고 있으며, 자본과 생산시설을 경북이나 해외로 이동시키고 있다. 대구 섬유산업의 재구조화 정책은 섬유업체간에 협력체제의 구축, 노.사공생의 노동제도 확립, 섬유업과 연관된 생산자 서비스업의 육성 등을 중심으로 추진되어야 할 것이다.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.377-401
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• 1994

This study examines the impact of national economic restructuring on regional development patterns. Korea's development over the last decade has been characterized by a rapid economic restructuring towards the information economy. This economic restructuring has had significant impacts on regional development patterns. The most remarkable feature is a clear coreperiphery disparity in terms of levels of informatization. Seoul showed an extraordinarily high level of informatization. The process of regional development in the information era is marked by an intensified spatial division of labor, which articulates with the pre-existing pattern of regional disparity. Information infrastructrue improvements for regional development do not necessarily result in reductions in regional unevenness. There is an urgent need to develop the integrated regional informatization strategy.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.480-497
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• 2002

This paper is concerned with unveiling the responsiveness of large Korean firms to external shock by examining corporate restructuring in terms of production and organization. Throughout empirical research, I speculate on how corporate restructuring influences and relates to corporate teaming and adaptation. The main findings of this research are as follows. First, the restructuring of business structure was expected to strengthen core competencies and improve profitability and the restructuring of organizational structure to make it possible for responding more quickly to radical changes in its business environment. Second, both downsizing and employment adjustment have assisted the firm with unlearning obsolete practices, preconditions necessary for effectively accomplishing new teaming practices. Third, both the spatial reorganization of production activities and process innovation require and involve learning processes. In conclusion, it claims that corporate restructuring can be seen as a powerful loaming tool, particularly in the context of radical economic change.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.243-260
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• 2006

The continuing enlargement, deepening integration of EU and penetration of extra-EU enterprise into EU market are forming a new geographical restructure of the production system. In this paper, I analyse the changing geography of the EU automotive production system. The globalization and regionalisation of production activity intensify a competition among the enterprise. The European automotive production system changes to a platform system and a modular system for a diminution of productive costs, a development of various products and a frequent innovation of products. The European automotive enterprise is restructuring geographically the production functions and products in order to promote efficiency on a new production system, enlarged production space and intensified economic integration. The European automotive industry tends to a spatial specialization and agglomeration according to the locational factors of production functions and products and the locational condition of regions. This intensifies the geographical hierarchic structure of production activity between the core and the periphery.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.17-34
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• 2001

This paper is to analyze how firms in a large firm-led industrial city have carried out the restructuring in the face of radical shifts, with focus on the strategy and the restructuring of firms in Ulsan, a typical industrial district in Korea that is specialized in heavy & chemical industry. It has been well known that the local economy has been led by a small number of large firms, including affiliates of chaebol, and its industrial structure has also been characterised as a clear dichotomy between large firms as a customer and small and medium-size firms as a supplier, which can be called not horizontal but vertical relations. It can identify some tendencies, however, that local companies have been rather dynamically changing in response to increasingly turbulent environment since the Asian crisis. Some are radical, but some incremental. These can be summarized in four distinctive but interlinked ways. First, more than half of local companies surveyed have attempted to change their production systems, mainly from the fordist mass production towards the flexible mass production, seeking both economies of scale and scope. Second, local firms have vigorously continued to reorganize the boundary of the production and the organization, by specializing products and focusing on the core competence in order to save costs and cope with radically changing customer demands in a flexible way. Third, there have been various strategies for the organizational innovation such as the introduction of team organization, the boundary blurring between the managerial and production workers and the intra-firm spin-offs, so as to improve managerial efficiency and competence in the use of internal labour market. Finally, they have tried to be more sensitive to the market and customers. These tendencies seem to be increasingly critical to sustain their competitiveness. To do so, they tend to focus increasingly not only on the competing via the product quality rather than through price, but also to seek to diversify the market and customer firms beyond national boundary.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.265-279
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• 1999

경제활동의 세계화는 세계적 금융체계의 출현을 수반하고 있으며 금융부문의 역할은 현대 경제체계에서 중요성을 더하고 있다. 또한 정보통신기술의 발달과 금융기법의 혁신, 자본이동의 자유화는 새로운 조절양식과 이에 따른 조절공간의 변화를 수반한다. 한국의 경우 금융구조조정은 전세계적인 금융위기와 필요에 의한 대응으로 이해되며 제도적 변화와 함께 금융기관의 흡수.합병.퇴출을 통하여 기업부문, 정부부문뿐 아니라 공간적으로도 막대한 영향을 미친다. 일반은행 점포수의 변화를 금융구조조정 이전인 1997년과 이후인 1998년을 비교 분석한 결과 점포수의 급격한 감소와 함께 지역적인 특색이 나타났다. 금융구조조정은 서울.경기를 포함한 수도권에서 가장 활발히 일어나고 있으며, 도시 인구규모에 민감하게 반응하여 소규모 도시일수록 변화의 폭이 감소하고 있다. 구조조정 기간 중에 은행수의 변화는 인구규모와 밀접한 연관성을 나타내고 있다.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.662-671
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• 1996

Since the world's economic and political structures have changed, the term 'globlization' has shown up as a dominant power and as a necessity for regional and national development. Each nation is responding to the globalization process economically and politically in various ways. In general, however, the economic response to the globalization is economic restructuring from the Fordist industries to 'flexible specialization'. And the political response to the globalization is 'global localization' as a new type of local politics(i.e., local policy activism or growth-enhancing local development policies). The crisis of Fordism shifted the role of local governments towards more involovement with local economic development. Local governments are mobilizing for loca economic development, they are taken into a process of institutional change that tends to redefine their responsibilities inside the state. Local governments thus tend to act as an entrepreneur in order to restructure theiir local economies and to compete with other national and international regions. State restructuring towards enerepreneurialism and efficient regional policy pursuing a pro-growth coalition trategy is chosen as a new mode of regulation for the post-Fordism at the local level. The flexible specialization as the post-Fordist economy and the local government as an entrepreneur are the global choice for globalization and a post-Fordist society. The paper focuses on the regulation theory which comprises the political economic perspective on resturcturing. Economic restructuring and state restructuring will be discussed in detail. And the paper tries to combine the economic globalization and the global localization as economic and political responses to globalization.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.175-195
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• 1997

This study attempts to understand new immigrants' socio-economic adaptation by linking them with the restructuring economies in large US metropolitan areas. Selecting Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, we examine the industrial distribution of employed Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups with respect to the industrial change experienced between 1980 and 1990, and residential concentration represented by higher location quotients. The findings are that new immigrant groups are employed in overall industrial sectors close to that of total population and their large residential concentrations are displayed near downtown as well as outlying areas. These suggest that new immigrant groups experience different socio-economic adaptation from those generalized in the previous European immigrants, concentrated in manufacturing sector and near downtown area. This study proposes that divergent economic restructuring across metropolitan areas and new immigrants' backgrounds should be considered for better understanding of immigrants' economic adaptation in the current economic restructuring and its spatial manifestation in the US contexts.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.358-376
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• 2011

This study investigated the agglomeration process of the towel industry in the Daejeon and Chungcheong regions, which are located in the mid-western part of South Korea, focusing in particular on industrial restructuring. Moreover, it aimed to identify the spatial features of the towel industry by analyzing the subcontracting linkages and to discover the implications of such linkages on government policy. The towel industry in the Daejeon and Chungcheong regions began to grow from the end of the Korean War when textile technicians from North Korea settled down in this area, spreading their techniques and know-how within the region. Later, in the 1980s, the industry underwent restructuring when companies within the region strengthened their linkages through corporate specialization based on the concept of social division of labor. Accordingly, the industrial linkages and linkage spaces, as well as characteristics of the industry, should all be considered to develop and implement policies for the regions of the towel industry.