한국 학계의 고유성은 존재하는가? 한국 사회학과 국제 사회학의 지식 담론 구조 비교를 중심으로

Abstract

Korean academia has sought to secure its own uniqueness differentiating it from global academia. Despite the constant debate over the academic dependency of non-Western scholars on Western academia, there has been little substantive evidence showing whether Korean academia is subordinate to global academia or whether it has developed its own distinctive knowledge discourses. Analysis of this topic is particularly important because the current university evaluation system often provides strong incentives for scholars to publish in journals indexed in the SSCI. If Korean academia features distinctive knowledge structures compared to international academia, then the emphasis on producing SSCI publications may actually be undermining the uniqueness of Korean academia by incentivizing Korean scholars to follow international trends. By analyzing all published research articles in the field of sociology collected from both KCI and SSCI-indexed journals between 2011 and 2018, we compare the similarities and differences of the knowledge discourse structures of Korean and international sociology, focusing on three key points: shared terms, topic distribution, and networks of topics. Our results show that Korean and international academia share rather few academic terms, that there are distinct differences in the topics of interest between KCI and SSCI. Also, our results demonstrate that Korean sociology produces knowledge discourses in response to the changing needs of Korean society, and that Korean academia connects topics in different ways than international academia. In light of these findings, we discuss the role of scholars and scholarship with respect to the development of Korean academia.