The Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Personal Contact in the Office Sector : The Case of Seoul - Research Proposal

Abstract

This research will examine the spatio-temporal pattern of office ("quarternary") sector. When examining various activities in the office sector, information appears as key concept. Though much of the information can be readily transacted by telecommunication, the qualitative essential parts of it still require office workers to travel and to meet(or to make personal contact). This study is primarily concerned with personal contact. Special reference is made to Seoul, the capital city of Korea. Retrospectively, the pattern is a product resulting from interaction between office workers' intentional behavior and constraints surrounding office activities. The pattern apparently influences the locational decision of office activities over time which, in turn, shapes daily office activity patterns. I will focus my research on: (1) the activity patterns of office jobs in spatio-temporal terms, particularly in regard to personal contact, and (2) the impact of the patterns on the out-of-job daily life of office workers, especially with reference to their family togetherness. This dissertation topic is related to several areas of research in urban and regional development. First, even if Korea today is not postindustrial, it is still true that in recent years office workers have become a growing sector of the urban labor force. This has raised questions as to how and in what ways office activities have been localized in urban space. The locational patterns of office jobs call for a deliberate discussion from such planning criteria as efficiency and equity. Second, power relationships as hierarchically conceived among office sectors in the complex of urban external economies seem to be one of the important variables which greatly influence the location of office activities. Existing literatures on office location theory have not explicitly attempted to deal with the power relationships as a crucial location factor. Therefore, an understanding of office location behavior in this respect would contribute to the design and evaluation of office location policy. It will improve national urban policy aimed at the dispersal of office activities in big cities toward other growth centers, and policies aimed toward the spatial reorganization of major urban sectors centering around office stations within a metropolitan region. Third, the quality of life within the urban labor force deserves major consideration from urban and regional planners. As regards office workers, the quality of their lives has drawn scant attention because their wages have been comparatively high. This is an outgrowth of the simple and often false observation that income is a sufficient indicator ·of the quality of life. Contacts in which office workers are engaged primarily with other people and partly with facilities are space-and time-bound so that they might affect the .quality of their daily lives. Accordingly, an alternative approach to the quality of office workers' daily lives in spatio-temporal terms is worthy of study. There is a need for research, since there is no previous adequate study on this subjects, especially with reference to a developing country like Korea. The following section presents a definition of the problem, the hypotheses to test, and some background on the structure of the office sector in Seoul. Section 2 reviews the -current literature related to the subject. Section 3 introduces a' research model followed by critical assessments of urban time and space studies. Section 4 briefly discusses the proposed research design. Finally, Section 5 addresses application of the research findings to urban policy.