TY - JOUR
T1 - Impact of country image on relationship maintenance
T2 - a case study of Korean Government Scholarship Program alumni
AU - Varpahovskis, Eriks
AU - Ayhan, Kadir Jun
N1 - Funding Information:
The National Institute for International Education, which is under the Korean Ministry of Education, runs the Global Korea Scholarship (GKS) program. The KGSP began in 1967 and is the flagship scholarship program within the GKS. Until 2008, the number of scholarships remained quite limited, but after the re-design of the project, the number rose to between 700 and 800 scholarships for graduate students and about 150 for undergraduate students, annually. The number of participating countries also grew in 2008. The government began considering international students not only for the internationalization of Korean higher education and as a source of income but also as a means of producing private ambassadors that could further promote Korea abroad and become a networking link (Byun and Kim 2011; MOFA 2016). In other words, the Korean government introduced public diplomacy-related objectives to this primarily educational program; these objectives being the promotion of cooperation and friendship between countries through educational exchanges; enhancing Korea’s national status by providing aid for the development of the education sector in developing countries; and the establishment of a Korea-friendly global network (NIIED 2018). In the next section, we introduce the analytical framework that guided our research.
Funding Information:
This project is supported by the 2018 and 2019 Korea Foundation Support for Policy-Oriented Research grants. We would like to thank Hyelim Lee and Tom Norris for invaluable research assistance; Moamen Gouda, Nancy Snow, Jeongnam Kim, Yeunjae Lee, Alexander Buhmann, Seong-Hun Yun, Rhonda Zaharna, and two anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on earlier drafts.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Governments sponsor student-mobility programs with the expectation that students will build a more favorable and informed opinion of the host country which, in turn, will determine more favorable behavior towards the host country. Nevertheless, assessments of this logic are rare. Based on a survey of the Korean Government Scholarship Program’s alumni (n = 579), we analyze the alumni’s country image of South Korea and how this image determines their relationship maintenance behavior with South Korean people. Our findings show that the KGSP alumni’s image of South Korea partly explains the variance in their personal and professional relationship maintenance with South Koreans. Our findings show that the alumni’s emotions about South Korea influence their personal relationship maintenance behavior more than does each of the cognitive dimensions of the country image, while the functional dimension, which evaluates their beliefs about the country’s competencies and the competitiveness of its economic and political systems, has the highest influence on the alumni’s professional relationship maintenance.
AB - Governments sponsor student-mobility programs with the expectation that students will build a more favorable and informed opinion of the host country which, in turn, will determine more favorable behavior towards the host country. Nevertheless, assessments of this logic are rare. Based on a survey of the Korean Government Scholarship Program’s alumni (n = 579), we analyze the alumni’s country image of South Korea and how this image determines their relationship maintenance behavior with South Korean people. Our findings show that the KGSP alumni’s image of South Korea partly explains the variance in their personal and professional relationship maintenance with South Koreans. Our findings show that the alumni’s emotions about South Korea influence their personal relationship maintenance behavior more than does each of the cognitive dimensions of the country image, while the functional dimension, which evaluates their beliefs about the country’s competencies and the competitiveness of its economic and political systems, has the highest influence on the alumni’s professional relationship maintenance.
KW - Country image
KW - Korean Government Scholarship Program
KW - PLS-SEM
KW - Public diplomacy
KW - Relationship management
KW - Student-mobility programs
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089368484&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1057/s41254-020-00177-0
DO - 10.1057/s41254-020-00177-0
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85089368484
SN - 1751-8040
VL - 18
SP - 52
EP - 64
JO - Place Branding and Public Diplomacy
JF - Place Branding and Public Diplomacy
IS - 2
ER -