South Korea under Compressed Modernity

Familial Political Economy in Transition

Kyung-Sup Chang

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136990250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The condensed social change and complex social order governing South Koreans' life cannot be satisfactorily delineated by relying on West-derived social theories or culturalist arguments. Nor can various globally eye-catching traits of this society in industrial work, education, popular culture, and a host of other areas be analyzed without developing innovative conceptual tools and theoretical frameworks designed to tackle the South Korean uniqueness directly.

This book provides a fascinating account of South Korean society and its contemporary transformation. Focusing on the family as the most crucial micro foundation of South Korea's economic, social, and political life, Chang demonstrates a shrewd insight into the ways in which family relations and family based interests shape the structural and institutional changes ongoing in South Korea today. While the excessive educational pursuit, family-exploitative welfare, gender-biased industrialization, virtual demise of peasantry, and familial industrial governance in this society have been frequently discussed by local and international scholarship, the author innovatively explicates these remarkable trends from an integrative theoretical perspective of compressed modernity. The family-centered social order and everyday life in South Korea are analyzed as components and consequences of compressed modernity.

South Korea under Compressed Modernity is an essential read for anyone studying Contemporary Korea or the development of East Asian societies more generally.

1
Compressed modernity and its familial basis

1 Purpose

South Korea is considered to have experienced rapid economic, political, and social transformations of an internationally unprecedented degree. Behind such transformations, however, is a society which has shown the unique tendency of perpetually reinforcing a family-centered social order. I have tried to describe the explosive and complex nature of South Korea’s societal transformations as compressed modernity.¹ It may be said that South Koreans have cultivated a compressed modernity anchored on familism.² Classical modernization theory once presupposed as a core process of modernization that the importance of (the) family as social institution and ideology would decline fundamentally because various social (or non-familial) entities supposedly take over major social functions such as economic production and education.³ Under the influence of this argument, societies like South Korea, where family appears to dominate the economic, political and social order, have been induced to percieve such realities as archaic and irrational and thus take a position of swiftly escaping or, at least, condemning them.

While normative judgments on the social rationality and/or the efficiency of familist order have never vanished, there is a deplorable deficiency of scholarly efforts to comprehensively document the concrete contents and characteristics of familist economic, political, and social orders as a concrete historical reality, to systematically map their cultural, institutional, and historical origins, and to categorize and theorize the way macro-level familist order is perceived, experienced, and reproduced in ordinary people’s actual lives. Although no local scholar would deny the fact that South Korean society is family-centered, they still cannot but suspect an Orientalist bias when Westerners view the society in this way. In such a complex context, familist order has attracted more everyday casual disputes on social conditions than systematic scholarly inquiries. Of course, there are numerous studies that have empirically revealed the family-centered behavior and attitude of South Koreans in various social aspects. However, their outcomes have never been theoretically integrated so as to produce an innovative new theory on South Korean society as a whole.

The current book attempts to fill these scholarly lacunae by mapping the familist characteristics of South Korea’s economic, political, and social order, analyzing the way these characteristics are interrelated with compressed modernity, and systematically examining the historical and theoretical traits of such familist modernity. Specifically, I conceptualize as compressed modernity the concrete characteristics of the political, economic, and social transformations experienced by South Koreans in an unprecedentedly rapid and complex manner, and examine in detail the familist structure and behavior as its micro-basis or manifestation. In the course of this, I critically deal with the earlier scholarship on modernization and modernity and indicate the limits and pitfalls of previous studies of familist order. Also, where necessary, I comparatively appraise South Korea’s family-centered modernity vis-à-vis other East Asian societies and Western societies so as to prepare a logical basis for theoretical characterization and generalization of the South Korean experience.

2 Family and modernity

Classical Western sociology explained that family contributed to the modernization process mainly through the diminution of its social functions and roles. Family as an archaic bulwark for introverted communitarian principles was supposedly obstructive to the development of industrial society, which required universalized and objective social relations and functions. However, as industrial society was marked by the sustained universal existence of family, scholars like Talcott Parsons had to legitimate the phenomenon in terms of meeting the psychological needs of affection and care.⁴ On the basis of such explanations, most approaches to family in the Western social sciences began to focus on micro-level interpersonal relationships within family. In this vein, family studies rapidly took on the nature of family relations study—sometimes under a new disciplinary branding such as “famology”—and thereby became isolated from other fields of sociology maintaining interest in macro-social structure and change.⁵ At the same time, a normative perception that family should exist as a unit of private life, separated from society, spread rapidly among the general public. Private life soon became a core subject for family studies.

Nonetheless, the late twentieth century was met with several new trends of scholarly interest in family-related phenomena: some presented powerful historical analyses on the importance of family/household economy as the organizational basis of class formation for early bourgeoisie; some reconstructed grassroots experiences of the industrial revolution in the West by weaving family histories or by using family as the unit of analysis; some studied family-centered responses of peasants and the urban poor to the structural underdevelopment of Third World economies; some analyzed the structural transformation of industrial capitalism by highlighting the labor-capital class conflict concerning various familial concerns; and some scrutinized the nature of the modern state by probing the state-family relationship as characterized by various social policies.⁶ These studies were not necessarily generated from within the formal boundary of conventional family sociology, but rather reflected the growing theoretical and empirical interest in family in various other fields such as social history, political economy, political sociology, economic anthropology, social policy studies, etc.

In South Korean academia, under the dominant influence of Western—mostly American—sociology, family studies have concentrated attention on the affectional and instrumental features of various interpersonal relationships within family as a unit of private life. However, even in South Korea, the macro-social importance of family has drawn substantial scholarly interest from various fields including social history, rural sociology, industrial sociology, gender studies, social welfare studies, etc.⁷ While these studies are not specifically or exclusively focused on family issues per se, they richly reveal family-society relations and family-related social problems in South Korea.

It is quite worthwhile to link the rapidly increasing interest in the macro-social importance of family both in and outside South Korea to the scholarship on modernity. It is not difficult to realize the central position of family in the modern industrial capitalist system if one considers the following observations together: that the class formation of Western bourgeoisie was organizationally based upon the patriarchal household economy; that the class solidarity of the proletariat has been substantially indebted to familial and kin networks; that the theoretical and practical basis of the welfare state has been inseparable from the family support system; that both the West’s capitalist exploitation of the Third World and the grassroots adaptation and resistance to such exploitation have been predicated upon family economy and kin solidarity; that the development of East Asian capitalism has been accompanied or preceded by family-based capital ownership, firm management, and social welfare. The conventional view that the fundamental decline of family in economic organizations, political order, and social relations is the social kernel of the modernization process thereby becomes untenable.

South Koreans on the one hand have achieved incomparably fast capitalist industrialization, political democratization, and social structural change, and on the other hand have exhibited a particularly strong family-centrism, i.e. an overwhelming influence of family on social order as well as private life. Considering these seemingly contradictory trends together, South Koreans’ compressed modernity may well have been constructed through family in many aspects. Likewise, many limits and problems of South Korean modernity may be closely associated with family. However, previous and current scholarship on economic development and sociopolitical change, whether in or outside South Korea, has grossly neglected everyday conditions and foundations of the economy, polity, and society. The visibly recurrent family-centered economic, political, and social order has either been regarded as evidence of deficient modernity or has been deliberately ignored. This position does not allow a proper explanation for such prevalent phenomena as the family-centered corporate management and political control, the family-centeredness or family-reliance of social policy, etc. Even when a normative position is taken to uproot the family-centered economic, political, and social order for the sake of “normal” or “just” modernity, such a task will require a clear, first-hand recognition of familist order.

3 Inheritance and reinvention of familism

The family-centered nature of Korean life is apparent not only in personal life but also in the social order, politics, and economy. This is a tradition dating back hundreds of years to old dynastic eras. In particular, the Confucian (or, more precisely, neo-Confucian) ideology, formally codified into the principles of political rule and social relationship, governed Chosun society by rendering family to play a central role in social control, political integration, economic production, and social support.⁸ A comprehensive set of norms, laws, and customs prescribed the attitudinal and behavioral details of such family-centered life. The social, political, and economic systems of the entire nation were elaborately attuned to the moral integrity and organizational stability of individual families. Chosun people could be loyal and useful to the state mainly by being faithful to their families. In fact, the state itself was conceptualized as a family, with the king serving as grand patriarchal father to ordinary people. The state-society relationship was described as a type of pseudo-familial bondage, and individuals’ loyalty to the state—royal authority—was carefully interpreted as an extended expression of filial piety to the parents. While such tradition has already been discussed by many scholars, one point deserving particular emphasis is that the modern social, political, and economic systems in South Korea have not necessitated its demise but rather have relied on it in many aspects.

On the part of the grassroots population, several decades of social dislocation and political turmoil since the mid-nineteenth century have obliged them to cling to their families as the only reliable and stable source of support and protection. When the colonial economic exploitation and political abuse of the grassroots were rampant, when a colossal civil war denied any certainties in social relations and economic activities, and when political regimes were unstable and authoritarian in managing civic life, most people had no recourse but to hope for their survival through familial solidarity. Even in the process of full-scale industrialization since the early 1960s, it has been family, along with other groupings with similar social characteristics, from which migrant workers and peddlers, urban industrial entrepreneurs, and other actors of capitalist industrialism have eked out the resources and strategies for economic success.

At the societal level, the defeat of two potential social revolutions from below (i.e. the Donghak Peasant War in the late nineteenth century and the socialist movement in the immediate post-colonial period) under colonial intervention resulted in a complete disorganization of grassroots civil (communal) society except for kinship networks. The new political regimes, which appeared as a result of either the changing international political order or a military coup, were neither ready for nor intended to undertake any fundamental reform against the remaining basic fabric of the social, cultural, and economic life of grassroots people. In fact, the modern school system came to incorporate the entire population, now without segregation between aristocrats and commoners, into the public education of social values and attitudes reflecting Confucian tradition to a substantial extent. Also, a series of post-war restoration policies, including land reform in particular, were geared to stabilize grassroots life in each familial unit.

The march to industrial capitalism orchestrated by the military regime of Park Chung-Hee from the 1960s needed family as a main institutional framework for mobilizing social and economic resources and controlling the political attitudes of local populations. It was a sort of mobilizational economic development based upon political authoritarianism that set South Koreans upon their historical course to the compressed modernity of today. The grassroots population, disorganized at the civil and communal level, existed in each familial unit, and the authoritarian developmentalist regime directly targeted that familial unit for mobilization of labor power, savings, agricultural surplus, military service, and even political consent. Such strategic dependence on family turned out to be highly effective, despite various problematic consequences that are shown in various chapters of this book.

South Koreans have created their national history and personal biography in a fundamentally family-dependent way. In that way, they have successfully condensed what Westerners had experienced socially, politically, and above all economically for over two centuries into an experience of less than half a century. South Koreans’ family-centered history still continues, even these days, making their compressed modernity somewhat self-contradictory. Their modernity, however, is not identical with that of Westerners. The ideological and practical primacy of family over the individual and society in various domains of life is as much a modern practice as a tradition. Such experience may be considered a unique criterion in distinguishing the structure and dynamic of South Korean society from those of many other societies. However, the same experience may be examined as a crucial real-world reference in critically reappraising the empirical relevance of Western social sciences.

4 Compressed modernity

Since the early 1990s, I have used the concept of compressed modernity in order to delineate various structural/historical characteristics of contemporary South Korean society.⁹ Numerous scholarly articles have been published both inside and outside South Korea in order to substantiate various aspects of compressed modernity. However, I have not yet conceptually formalized compressed modernity because I am not inclined to produce its theoretical definition deductively, but wish to adopt a research strategy of ascertaining its parameters within historical realities alongside various empirical analyses of relevant social phenomena. This strategy can be complemented by an increasing body of research and literature that explicitly utilizes the compressed modernity perspective in order to explain various aspects and problems of South Korean society.¹⁰ Compressed modernity can be considered a conceptual tool for researching South Korean society through analytic induction, which is explained below. Since I have been carrying out various studies under this strategy, the theoretical contents of compressed modernity continue to be constructed and reconstructed.

Compressed modernity has five specific dimensions constituted interactively by the two axes of time/space and condensation/compression (see Figure 1.1).¹¹ Time involves both physical time (point, sequence and amount of time) and historical time (era, epoch and phase). Space involves physical space (location and area) and cultural space (place and region). Condensation denotes the phenomenon that the physical process required for the movement or change between two time points (eras) or between two locations (places) is abridged or compacted.¹² Compression is the phenomenon whereby diverse components of multiple civilizations which have existed in different areas and/or places coexist in a certain delimited time-space and influence and change each other.¹³ The phenomena generated in these four dimensions, in turn, interact with each other in complicated ways and further generate new social phenomena.

Let us briefly illustrate each of the five dimensions of compressed modernity. Dimension [I] can be exhibited by the fact that South Korea has abridged the duration needed for its transition from poor agrarian society to advanced industrial economy through a few decades of explosive industrialization and economic growth. South Koreans proudly call this “compressed growth” (apchuk seongjang). More broadly, South Koreans are considered to have experienced “compressed modernization.”¹⁴ Dimension [II] is related to the fact that the successive domination of South Korea by external forces (Japan and the US) and South Koreans’ own effort to aggressively bring in or replicate various elements of Western civilization have radically reshaped the spatial configuration of the country. In particular, South Korea’s major cities have almost instantly become physical arenas for replication of Western cultures and institutions.¹⁵ Skipping the usual geographic requirement for inter-civilizational exchange like the Silk Road, an abridgement or dismantlement of space has taken place in the course of South Korea’s Westernization. Dimension [III] involves the phenomena of intense competition, collision, disjointing, articulation, and compounding among traditional, modern and postmodern elements within a compact so...

Table of contents

• Routledge advances in Korean studies
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Compressed modernity and its familial basis
• 2 Accidental pluralism
• 3 The social investment family and educational politics
• 4 The nuclear family and welfare politics
• 5 Women’s labor and gendered industrialization
• 6 The peasant family and rural-urban relations
• 7 Chaebol
• 8 Politics of defamiliation
• 9 The sustainability crisis of familial modernity
• Notes
• References
• Index