Intergenerational transmission of environmental household practices among South Korean families: continuity and change

Abstract

We seek to understand how environmentalism is experienced, discussed and transmitted by South Korean families in the context of changing economic and environmental circumstances. Qualitative interviews with three-generation Korean families are used, in a country characterised in the past fifty years by rapid economic changes alongside continuation of traditional collectivistic social structures. We emphasise the family unit as an arena for the transmission of cultural dispositions, routines, habits and practices across generations. Relying on social practice theoretical framing, our findings suggest that in a mix of continuity and change, family routines are translated into complementing centripetal and centrifugal forces to encompass four themes: transmission processes, routinising of cultural habits, top-down intergenerational transmission with shifting motivations, and top-down intergenerational transmission with declining involvement. We discuss these findings in light of the theoretical heuristic of environmental habitus.