Research

QuestionWhat organizational conditions obstruct or reshape the adoption of smart factories, digital twins, and physical AI?

Selected work & contributions

The Human Backend of Smart Shipyards examines the precarious work that keeps shipyard data stable. It places the labor behind digital systems at the center of the analysis, connecting the apparent stability of data to the employment and organizational conditions under which it is produced.

Approach

I approach digital transformation through the work that makes technologies usable in organizations. This brings organizational sociology into conversation with STS: who produces and maintains data, how that work is organized, and how formal plans for automation meet everyday production practices.

Questions for policy & industry

What should innovation policy support alongside investment in automation? The research raises questions about data maintenance, skills, employment, and the coordination of work that sustains technologies after their introduction.

Questions ahead

This line of inquiry asks what organizational arrangements allow smart factories, digital twins, and AI to take hold in production. It directs attention to data maintenance, coordination, and the division of labor alongside the technical performance of a system.

QuestionHow do production organizations and labor markets shape the formation, mobility, and settlement of engineers and the spatial division of regional economies?

Selected work & contributions

Gender, Engineering, and Innovation examines industrial patriarchy and women engineers’ entry and retention in southeastern South Korea. Ulsan Dystopia and Levitating Factory place workforce questions alongside the history of manufacturing growth, urban change, and the changing status of Hyundai Motor’s Ulsan plant.

Approach

I study engineers as a workforce formed within particular production organizations and places. Combining field research with historical and quantitative analysis, this inquiry connects technical labor markets to gendered divisions of work, employment opportunities, and the conditions of settlement in industrial regions.

Questions for policy & industry

How can workforce policy connect training with job quality, gendered access to engineering, and the conditions of regional settlement? This inquiry considers firms' demand for skills alongside the longer-term reproduction of industrial regions.

Questions ahead

The comparative agenda asks how industries and regions organize the formation, mobility, and retention of technical workers. Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are prospective comparative settings for examining the relationship between production organizations and the geography of engineering work.

QuestionHow do gender orders and social reproduction in industrial regions intersect with the politics of scale and regional restructuring?

Selected work & contributions

My research on local university students follows work experience and job search in southeastern Korea. Joint work with Haenam Park compares megacity projects in Busan–Ulsan–Gyeongnam and Kansai, while work with Hyang-A Lee critically examines local extinction discourse. Alongside the Geoje and Ulsan books and the study of women engineers, these works connect regional futures to unequal opportunities and social reproduction.

Approach

This continuing agenda brings regional sociology and gender studies into conversation. It asks how gendered work and social reproduction in industrial regions intersect with struggles over the distribution of authority and resources across national, regional, and urban scales.

Questions for policy & industry

How do industrial and regional policies distribute opportunities and burdens across gender, generations, and places? The politics of scale brings the allocation of authority and resources into the same inquiry as production and social reproduction.

Questions ahead

Ongoing work with Joo-Hyoung Ji continues the inquiry into industrial patriarchy at the intersection of gender and region. Work with Minwook Chang connects questions about young people’s subject formation and political sensibilities to the broader debate over regional futures.

QuestionHow do research support systems define the value and purpose of research and shape the institutional conditions of knowledge production?

Selected work & contributions

Basic Research as an Alibi (in press in Critical Review of History) offers an STS commentary on the research support system for the humanities and social sciences. It examines the institutional framing of the value and purpose of research.

Approach

An STS approach examines how research support systems organize knowledge production. This inquiry into academic institutions sits within a broader concern with the conditions of science, technology, and innovation, alongside research grounded in industrial workplaces.

Questions for policy & industry

What kinds of research are valued, and what conditions of knowledge production receive support? The policy question concerns the relationship between the purposes of support systems and the practices of research.

Questions ahead

Continuing inquiry examines the relationship between the purposes attributed to research and the institutions that organize it.

QuestionHow do pathways out of industrial cities diverge from pathways of staying?

QuestionHow is the geography of semiconductor talent drawn, and how do its boundaries shape regional futures?