Setting down the spirit and leadership of Tae-Joon Park in scholarly form, so that it remains usable by teachers and by society at large.
POSCO led South Korea’s industrialisation in the second half of the twentieth century and became one of the world’s foremost steelmakers. Tae-Joon Park ran the company for its first twenty-five years and never let go of it thereafter. Yet while management scholars had studied POSCO at length, his own spirit and leadership had gone almost unexamined.
Over 2010 and 2011 thirty-eight scholars wrote thirty-two papers, and their work appeared together in April 2012 as the five-volume Chungam Park Tae-Joon Research Series. Their stated aim was that later generations should be able to remember his spirit and put it to use as an intangible social asset — that the word “hero” should not be allowed to stand in for the substance of what he did.
When the Institute opened in February 2013 the work became continuous. The series has since run to eight volumes, and the findings were rewritten as classroom material. What each strand covers is set out under Fields of Research.
Carrying it on — the POSCO TJ Park Foundation
Chungam (靑巖) was his pen name, and the foundation he established still works under it. It began in January 1971 as the Steel Scholarship Society — set up two years before the first iron was tapped at Pohang, while the site was still open ground — and was reorganised under its present name in 2005.
It runs four programmes. The POSCO TJ Park Prize (established 2006) is awarded annually in science, technology, education and community service; the POSCO Science Fellowship (from 2009) funds early-career researchers in the basic and applied sciences. The POSCO Asia Fellowship supports students from across Asia and a programme for opinion leaders, and the POSCO Youth Fellowship supports young people in Pohang and Gwangyang.
Where the Institute sets his spirit down in writing, the foundation invests it in people. The POSCO TJ Park Foundation is a separate body, established by POSCO, and is not part of the Institute.