Mapping the Research Logic and Identifing Soft Power
This week, I reflect on the motivation and the research logic of my project. This reflection helped me map out all the topics I need to cover and allowed me to refine the research questions I initially proposed. I currently have two options for the project title in mind. The first is Behind the Beat: K-pop Globalization, BTS, and Cultural Soft Power. The second is Behind the Beat: Breaking Western Dominance and Shaping a New Cultural Hegemony. The logical flow of my research is as follows:
A nation’s global influence no longer relies solely on military or economic hard power. The ability to tell its cultural story to the world is now equally important (Nye, 2008). For a long time, Western countries have dominated the global discourse. Western countries control international communication channels and leave little room for other countries to tell their own stories. In this context, South Korea emerged as a “dragon slayer” aiming to break this Western cultural hegemony. Since the late 1990s, to help rebuild South Korea’s economy after the Asian Financial Crisis and create a new global image after the Korean War (Kim, 2025), the South Korean government has introduced various policies to support the cultural industry and has launched an export-centered economic strategy. Popular music is a core part of the South Korean cultural industry. The K-pop industry studies Western pop formats and hybridizes them with Korean traditional music. This integration has led to many globalization successes, from works by Psy to BTS. In recent years, BTS is the most successful and typical representative of K-pop’s successful globalization. Therefore, it is meaningful to study how and why K-pop and BTS successfully integrate traditional culture with pop music. Based on this logic, my research will cover the following topics: soft power, the cultural industries, and Korean cultural policy. The cultural industries section will include cultural imperialism, Korean traditional culture, and Korean popular culture. I will also explore the reasons for BTS’s success.
From the core research question, I am exploring three sub-questions. The first is how South Korean cultural policy drives the global dissemination of K-pop to enhance the nation’s soft power. The second is how the music production and concert visual design of BTS’s album Arirang integrate traditional culture to resonate with a global audience. The third is what strategies other nations can learn from K-pop and BTS’s successful globalization to enhance their cultural soft power. Finally, as K-pop rapidly expands, I will raise a concern about whether the “dragon slayer” is becoming the new dragon, questioning whether K-pop’s standardized and commercialized cultural exports are shaping a new cultural hegemony.
After identifying my core research topics, I began to review literature on soft power. Joseph Nye was the first scholar to introduce this concept in 1990 at the end of the Cold War. Nye originally used this concept to explain the comprehensive advantage of the United States in both hard and soft power. At that time, scholars considered American soft power the most effective force driving the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2004, Nye published “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics” to emphasize its crucial role in international relations. In his 2006 article “Think Again: Soft Power,” he argued that soft power effectively solves international cooperation issues. He also specifically discussed East Asian countries and pointed out their long histories and rich cultural heritage. Nye predicted that East Asian soft power would grow significantly alongside their economic rise. In 2011, he further expanded on these ideas in the book “The Future of Power”. Soft power was defined as the ability to influence others to achieve desired outcomes (Nye & Goldsmith, 2011). Based on this framework, my project defines soft power as a force that relies on attraction to shape others’ preferences. It is an appealing power formed when an actor uses agenda-setting and persuasion to gain target audiences’ recognition. The primary resources of a nation’s soft power include its culture, political values, and foreign policies. Among these, culture serves as a fundamental and vital source of soft power. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate K-pop’s globalization strategies by analyzing how they integrate traditional culture into music production and stage visual designs.
Kim, N. J. (2025). Exporting Culture, Building a Nation: South Korea’s Use of Pop Culture as a Soft Power Tool. CMC Senior Theses. 4003.
Nye, J. S. (2008). Public Diplomacy and Soft Power. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616(1), 94-109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716207311699
Nye, J. S., & Goldsmith, J. L. (2011). The future of power. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 64(3), 45-52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41149419