One of the most important consequences of globalisation in the world today is increasing economic inequality within and between nations. Globalisation does not simply increase economic inequality: it also modifies the pattern of social stratification and the game of status competition. What happens, however, when social mobility system becomes globalised?

Professor Hagen Koo?s talk examines the changing pattern of social mobility in South Korea as a
consequence of globalisation. Koo will focus on the rise of a cosmopolitan strategy of social mobility, the core of which involves sending children overseas for early English education and foreign degrees as well as for other cosmopolitan cultural aptitudes. Professor Koo will argue that cosmopolitanism in South Korea, as in many other societies, does not simply represent a cultural orientation but a new strategy of class reproduction employed by affluent segments of the middle class in this age of globalisation.