This book traces the origins and transformations of a people—the Zainichi, migrants from the Korean peninsula to Japan and their descendants. Using a wide range of arguments and evidence—historical and comparative, political and social, literary and pop-cultural—John Lie reveals the social and historical conditions that gave rise to Zainichi identity, while simultaneously demonstrating its complex, fractured, even ephemeral nature.

Key to understanding Zainichi ideology are, for Lie, the nationalist yearnings it expressed from a condition of diaspora and discrimination. Lie’s nuanced treatment acknowledges both the tragic and triumphant qualities embedded in this formulation, while resisting the essentialism it implies. Rather, he embraces the vicissitudes of the lived experience of Koreans in Japan, shedding light on the vexing topics of diaspora, migration, identity, and group formation.

Examining language and nation-building in China, this dissertation argues that language is malleable, not only in its function in society, but also in its form. Moreover, I argue that a change in form (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar) can also facilitate a change in function. I show how language reformers in China sought to broaden literacy and education among the people by creating a language that was easier to learn. In detailing the course of Chinese language reform over the early decades of the twentieth century, I find existing social theory—particularly that of Bourdieu—unequal to the task of explaining the revolutionary transformation of language practices, not only in China, but also among its East Asian neighbors, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

Pierre Bourdieu’s examinations of language, to be sure, do not produce a general theory of language so much as they incorporate linguistic thinking into a larger theory of symbolic power. Borrowing from structuralism’s contention that symbolic systems such as language are internally structured, Bourdieu argued that this internal structuredness enables the structuring of social experience. He treats language as a form of cultural capital, one that can be transubstantiated through the education system into social and economic capital on the labor market. Capital is unequally distributed in society, and this inequality gives rise to the structure of symbolic systems: in the case of language, the hierarchical distinctions we make in types of language that differ in prestige and legitimacy. Bourdieu argued that these symbolic inequalities enable the reproduction of social inequalities.

This reading of language’s role in society runs into problems when we look beyond its Western European empirical basis. In China in particular (and in East Asia in general) the abrupt break with longstanding language practices ended the social reproduction that they had long enabled. China, along with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, had been bound for nearly two millennia by the use of Classical Chinese as a supranational lingua franca among the literate elite. This language defies the common Eurocentric understanding of writing as purely auxiliary to, dependent on, and representative of speaking—a notion today termed “phonocentrism.” Primarily a written medium, Classical Chinese can, of course be read aloud. But, because it is written in characters that only partially and vaguely correspond with specific sounds, the language can be read aloud using any number of regional pronunciation systems—including those that are only notionally based on forms of spoken Chinese, as in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for hundreds of years. Thus, Classical Chinese as a medium of writing, to an extreme degree, stands independent from spoken language.

Under Western pressure and influence, intellectuals after China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) saw Classical Chinese as an impediment to modernization. Phonocentrism ruled the day: following the Japanese example, reformers sought to narrow the huge gap between the written and spoken languages. Mandarin was the national standard that emerged from fractious debates among intellectuals. Pieced together from existing language practices, Mandarin drew from the idea of guanhua, the traditional lingua franca of imperial officialdom that was strongly influenced by the speech of the imperial court that had resided starting in 1368 in Nanjing. This city’s speech retained an influence on the language long after the Ming dynasty’s relocation of the capital to Beijing in 1421. Beijing’s own speech only really began exerting influence in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1930s, after two decades of cantankerous debates among language reformers, the more or less final form of Mandarin was based primarily (though not exclusively) on the pronunciation of Beijingers with a “middle school education.” The new language’s written counterpart was modeled on the vernacular novels of the past few centuries and advocated by the leading intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement.

This new language differed from its predecessors not just in form but also in function. Unlike Classical Chinse, it was not intended just for an elite few. Instead, it was meant to be widely accessible, so as to unite a nascent and fragile post-imperial Chinese nation. It did so by hewing more closely to the everyday speech of modestly educated people. This conscious reflection of living practice by the new language was meant to make it easier to learn, thus raising literacy rates and enabling national strengthening. Thus, language standardization in China was an attempt at social leveling, contrary to the Bourdieusian contention that language standardization sustains an elite exclusivity that helps reproduce social inequality.

In this dissertation, I show how the sound system of Mandarin was designed to suit a nationalist vision of society, and how such a nationalized language represented a reimagining of how languages and peoples are linked. I also show how the materiality of language was implicated in this reform process when intellectuals sought to simplify the script by compelling equipment changes in the publishing industry. All of these changes, I then demonstrate, took place amid parallel linguistic shifts in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, whose own language practices underwent nationalizing transformations. Finally, I show how the changes in language policy in China produced the ever more stringent equating of language, ethnicity, and nation that we see in the country today.

More than one-half million people of Korean descent reside in Japan today—the largest ethnic minority in a country often assumed to be homogeneous. This timely, interdisciplinary volume blends original empirical research with the vibrant field of diaspora studies to understand the complicated history, identity, and status of the Korean minority in Japan. An international group of scholars explores commonalities and contradictions in the Korean diasporic experience, touching on such issues as citizenship and belonging, the personal and the political, and homeland and hostland.

Engineering Inequality: Rethinking Inclusion in the San Francisco Bay Area Tech Industry draws on in-depth interviews to analyze how the organization, culture, and interactions within tech companies contribute to persistent gender inequality in the industry. Most tech executives attribute this gender imbalance to the educational pipeline, or the shortage of women graduating college with computer science degrees. I argue, however, that this perspective ignores the divergent work experiences men and women face once they make it through the educational pipeline. I investigate multiple facets of the tech industry that contribute to gender inequality, from the interplay between gender and belonging, to the gendered role sorting within tech companies, to the language that workers and companies use to discuss workplace diversity.

The first empirical chapter, “Vanishing Women: Gender, Presentation, and Belonging,” examines the meaning of belonging in the tech industry. Although tech companies make claims toward egalitarianism, many women find it difficult to fit the image of what I call the ideal tech worker. Within this context, women often take steps to neutralize their gender at work, using androgyny strategically to cope with working in this male-dominated industry. Some women who were otherwise conventionally feminine in their non-work lives donned a “tech uniform” of jeans and t-shirts in an effort to blend in at work. Others discussed more dramatic changes to how they think about their own gender identities, including, in some cases, changes to the pronouns and names used at work. Although it is often argued that more women are needed in the tech industry to broaden perspectives and change company culture, I find that the women currently working in tech are not so much changing the culture but are being changed by the culture.

The next chapter, “Glass Walls: Gender, Role Sorting, and Unequal Trajectories,” examines the different career trajectories of men and women in the tech industry. Although the pipeline perspective assumes that technical training stops at graduation, men are often informally coached to learn technical skills by their coworkers. It is often assumed that men without STEM backgrounds are capable of learning technical skills. In some cases, they are transitioned from non-technical roles to more prestigious technical roles. In contrast, women are excluded from these coaching opportunities and are steered out of technical positions altogether. Because women hit a “glass wall” when it comes to technical positions, they are effectively excluded from some of the most desirable positions in the tech industry. Many women are also diverted towards uncompensated “diversity work” within their companies, which ranges from organizing implicit bias trainings to collecting demographic data on behalf of their companies. That is, women are underrepresented in technical positions not only because they do not have the educational credentials to be hired, but also because they are not given the same opportunities as men to transition into these roles. I argue that the gendered steering that takes place within tech companies exacerbates occupational segregation and reifies ideas about who is appropriate for technical work.

The final chapter, “We’re Better Than Most: (Re)Defining Diversity,” catalogs the meaning of the term “diversity” within the tech industry. Although most respondents acknowledged a “diversity problem” in the tech industry more broadly, they nevertheless constructed their own companies as “better than most” in terms of diversity. They make this claim by drawing favorable comparisons with other tech companies and using expansive definitions of the term diversity. This chapter demonstrates how individual tech workers and their companies can rationalize the lack of diversity within their workplaces, and might explain why efforts to increase diversity have stalled.

The dissertation provides a new understanding of the organization and culture of Bay Area tech companies and how individuals working within them experience and navigate their workplaces. I argue that the culture and organization of tech companies play a critical role in reproducing inequality in the tech industry. Company cultures that perpetuate specific images of what an ideal tech worker looks not only make it difficult for women to find acceptance, but also lead to real career benefits for men. If men and women are systematically steered into different roles within tech companies, this will exacerbate gender segregation within the industry beyond the segregation produced by the educational pipeline alone. Furthermore, I argue that by using expansive definitions of diversity and convincing workers that they are making good faith diversity efforts, companies impede more meaningful efforts to increase diversity among those who are underrepresented in the industry.