• Journal of School Social Work
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• v.43
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• pp.81-99
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• 2018

Drawing on an open system approach to understanding schools as organizations, this study examined whether challenges experienced by teachers in immigrant neighborhoods are mitigated to the extent in which schools effectively collaborate with parents and other agents in the neighborhoods. Data were gathered from a total of 328 teachers in 32 elementary and middle schools located within areas characterized by high levels of immigrant residential concentration in Seoul and Gyeonggi. The data showed that challenges experienced by teachers were significantly lessened in schools that had organic ties with agents in the external environments. This finding sheds new light on the importance of understanding schools as open-system organizations whose successful performance largely depends on factors external to classrooms. It appears that boundary spanning and bridging strategies may be utilized by school leaders to improve teachers' task performance at schools in areas of immigrant concentration.

• 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.15 no.3
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• pp.376-389
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• 2012

Ethnic entrepreneurship, an important means by which immigrants improve economic status, is widely believed to be facilitated by their residential concentration, i.e. ethnic enclaves. However, the recent immigrants' residential dispersion and re-clustering in some selected well-to-do suburbs portend changes in the role of ethnic enclave as a nest of immigrant entrepreneurship. This paper investigates the impacts of the residential dispersal on ethnic entrepreneurship with a case study of Korean small businessmen in Chicago, Illinois PMSA. The research utilizes the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) to know the overall changes in Korean entrepreneurship through 1990s and conducts a survey to understand reactions and surviving strategies of Korean enclave businessmen to the residential shifts. Relevant to those analyses is the enclave-economy hypothesis which argues benefit from spatial clustering of co-ethnic entrepreneurs by yielding more business opportunities and higher returns.