Kiat-Jin Lee
I am Kiat-Jin Lee (李杰仁), also known as K.J. Lee. I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the ‘Colleges & Universities 2000’ study at the University of California, Riverside. I received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from the New School for Social Research. Subsequently, I was a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore and a Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. My primary research interests encompass the sociology of education, social stratification and mobility as well as political economy.
I am completing my first book manuscript, The Political Economy of ‘Cultural Reproduction’ in Singapore, 1819-1996. My doctoral dissertation is the source of the first part. Utilizing an assortment of statistical, archival, oral life history, ethnographic and other research, this monograph is a comparative-historical analysis of the implications of the expansion of mass education and industrialization on the inequalities among the English-speaking, Chinese-speaking and Malay-speaking in Singapore. The English-speaking included fractions of the Chinese and Indians as well as the Eurasians. In due course, I shall be liaising with academic publishers of repute.
In this manuscript, I aim to explicate the two mediating processes between social origin and employment. The first is between social background and schools. The second is between educational institutions and jobs. The status attainment model is arguably the most widespread method of evaluating education and mobility. Nevertheless, it presumes causal relations between social origin and educational attainment as well as educational level and occupational rank on the basis of statistical correlation. A statistically correlated relationship does not necessarily denote that one variable instigates the other, since it merely signifies contingency between the two. My questions are why and how.
Accordingly, there are two components to my inquiry. In the first segment, this monograph corroborates that when and how the antecedents of each linguistic group had arrived in Singapore determined its market situations and life chances. Simply, it tracks the dominance of the English-speaking over the Chinese-speaking and Malay-speaking throughout each political economy. Not only did when and how the forebears of each category had arrived supply the conditions regarding its capacity to maximize the makeover of the political economy when the Straits Settlements, of which Singapore was a component, became a Crown Colony, these also in turn situated the equally crucial circumstances about its categorically differentiated ability to exploit educational expansion and industrialization a century later, where schooling was again pivotal.
In the second section, this manuscript demonstrates how schools reproduced and legitimized the longstanding status quo despite the development of mass education and industrialization in Singapore. While they were the conduits of upward mobility for the scholastically disposed among the subordinate categories, schools were merely extensions of the privileged cultural milieus in the undertaking to prepare the offspring for adulthood. Comparatively, the scions of the English-speaking would advance through the elitist missionary schools and foreign universities to the command positions of the political economy even as those of the Chinese-speaking local notables progressed via the recently founded district schools and local institutes of higher learning to the newly generated technical professions. Meanwhile, the offspring of the Chinese-speaking working classes and Malay-speaking proceeded through these very same municipal schools to the subsidiary positions of the industrializing economy. Therefore, for the dominated milieus, there were limits towards this mobility unless they had attended the school of the Establishment, the strictly meritocratic Raffles Institution, which truly altered their categorical memberships.
I am completing my first book manuscript, The Political Economy of ‘Cultural Reproduction’ in Singapore, 1819-1996. My doctoral dissertation is the source of the first part. Utilizing an assortment of statistical, archival, oral life history, ethnographic and other research, this monograph is a comparative-historical analysis of the implications of the expansion of mass education and industrialization on the inequalities among the English-speaking, Chinese-speaking and Malay-speaking in Singapore. The English-speaking included fractions of the Chinese and Indians as well as the Eurasians. In due course, I shall be liaising with academic publishers of repute.
In this manuscript, I aim to explicate the two mediating processes between social origin and employment. The first is between social background and schools. The second is between educational institutions and jobs. The status attainment model is arguably the most widespread method of evaluating education and mobility. Nevertheless, it presumes causal relations between social origin and educational attainment as well as educational level and occupational rank on the basis of statistical correlation. A statistically correlated relationship does not necessarily denote that one variable instigates the other, since it merely signifies contingency between the two. My questions are why and how.
Accordingly, there are two components to my inquiry. In the first segment, this monograph corroborates that when and how the antecedents of each linguistic group had arrived in Singapore determined its market situations and life chances. Simply, it tracks the dominance of the English-speaking over the Chinese-speaking and Malay-speaking throughout each political economy. Not only did when and how the forebears of each category had arrived supply the conditions regarding its capacity to maximize the makeover of the political economy when the Straits Settlements, of which Singapore was a component, became a Crown Colony, these also in turn situated the equally crucial circumstances about its categorically differentiated ability to exploit educational expansion and industrialization a century later, where schooling was again pivotal.
In the second section, this manuscript demonstrates how schools reproduced and legitimized the longstanding status quo despite the development of mass education and industrialization in Singapore. While they were the conduits of upward mobility for the scholastically disposed among the subordinate categories, schools were merely extensions of the privileged cultural milieus in the undertaking to prepare the offspring for adulthood. Comparatively, the scions of the English-speaking would advance through the elitist missionary schools and foreign universities to the command positions of the political economy even as those of the Chinese-speaking local notables progressed via the recently founded district schools and local institutes of higher learning to the newly generated technical professions. Meanwhile, the offspring of the Chinese-speaking working classes and Malay-speaking proceeded through these very same municipal schools to the subsidiary positions of the industrializing economy. Therefore, for the dominated milieus, there were limits towards this mobility unless they had attended the school of the Establishment, the strictly meritocratic Raffles Institution, which truly altered their categorical memberships.
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