Korea Confronts Globalization

Yunshik Chang, Hyun-ho Seok, Donald Baker, Yunshik Chang, Hyun-ho Seok, Donald Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415458795
• eBook ISBN: 9781134046935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Korea Confronts Globalization looks at the way in which the phenomenon of globalization has impacted on Korean society in terms of national identity, corporate change, labour markets, democracy, tradition and social policy, and the implications for Korea's social cohesion in a continually globalizing world.

While becoming more open to the outside world, South Korea has remained a cohesive national community with a strong nationalist reaction against the globalization of Korea and with Koreans constantly reminding themselves of the need to retain their national identity. They have also learned to cope with various forms of conflict arising from diversified interests in a complex society and the South Korean government is now making a serious attempt to establish a welfare state with various schemes designed to help the poor and needy to maintain a minimum level of 'decent' living. But it is uncertain whether South Korean society will continue to remain cohesive. Social inequality is increasing and the class divisions appear to be hardening and as such can Korea remain cohesive?

As a volume looking at the political and social implications of globalization in modern South Korea, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Korean and East Asian studies, comparative sociology, development studies and politics

Part I
Status politics

Introductory notes

Donald Baker

Globalization does not affect everyone equally. Whether we focus on its cultural social, economic or political impact, we cannot help but notice that some benefit more than others, and some suffer ill-effects more than others do. Globalization can exacerbate conflicts of interest that already exist in societies before they are subject to the transforming pull of external economies, politics and cultures. It can also create new areas of tension as it stimulates new arenas for competition and creates new criteria for status, wealth and the exercise of power. For example, as Sung-Nam Cho points out, globalization has been a mixed blessing for the women of Korea. Integration into global economic and social relations has opened up whole new avenues for women to contribute to their nation’s economy, and to be compensated financially for doing so. Thanks to the globalization of the Korean economy, Korean women today have many more choices regarding what kind of work they will engage in than their ancestors in pre-modern Korea could have even dreamed of. For example, they can now work in factories or offices. However, they still do not have as many opportunities for financial autonomy as do men, nor are the financial rewards they can expect from their work normally as lucrative as the rewards men receive. Moreover, they are more likely than men to be laid off when there is a downturn in the economy.

This gender disparity is partially due to the lingering legacy of the low status and lack of autonomy women suffered in pre-modern Korea compared to men. However, globalization has exacerbated that gender inequality by extending it to offices and factories. Pressure on the Korean economy in the early stages of globalization-stimulated industrialization to rely on low-wage labor for the competitive price advantage that would allow Korean products to compete in world markets meant that most of the new job opportunities available to women were jobs that neither paid well nor rewarded initiative or autonomy.

Even women who have avoided or moved up from such low-paying and low-status jobs find nonetheless that they have not benefited as much from globalization as have men. For example, the traditional expectation that women are responsible for cooking, overseeing the children’s education and otherwise managing their household has been joined by pressure on women to work outside the home in order to contribute to the funds needed to pay for mounting household expenses. This means that women face a much heavier burden than men, since most men are only responsible for earning a decent income and do not have to do much housework when they arrive home exhausted after a day at the office.

Moreover, a growing and modernizing economy has meant greater pressure on women to consume more products of that economy. Whereas in the past once a woman was married she was not expected to keep up with changes in fashion or pay a lot of attention to her personal appearance, now some housewives feel compelled to spend time, energy and money maintaining the fiction that they are neither overworked nor growing older. The “missy” phenomenon Cho writes about is one more financial and psychological burden women face in a cultural and economic environment that has been rapidly transformed by globalization. Both men and women in the southwestern part of Korea were adversely affected when globalization exacerbated an existing tradition of regional discrimination. As Eui-Young Yu shows, discrimination against people from the southwestern part of Korea, particularly on the part of people from the southeast, has existed for a long time on the peninsula. However, it has come to the fore as a burning social issue only over the past few decades. One reason for this change is that the economic gap between southeastern and southwestern Korea has grown wider as the Korean economy overall has grown in response to the stimuli of contact with external economies. There are a couple of reasons for that growing economic disparity. First of all, globalization stimulated rapid economic growth, which made the differences between different regions more noticeable because economic growth, and the import of foreign goods as well as foreign models of production, produced a greater number and broader range of criteria with which relative rates of economic growth could be compared. Second, because South Korea was pushed toward Japan by the strong winds of globalization, and southeastern Korea is a lot closer to Japan than is southwestern Korea, southeastern Korea globalized much faster than southwestern Korea and grew more prosperous much faster.

Even though the southwestern part of the Korean peninsula has modernized, it has not done so as the same rate as the southeast and thus the traditional southeastern disdain for people from the southwest has been reinforced by the impression that the economy, society and culture of the southwest is lagging behind that of the rest of the country and therefore the people who live there are country bumpkins unqualified for positions of political or economic leadership. That is one reason, along with favoritism, why the people from the Honam region are under-represented in the leadership structure of South Korea.

1 Globalization and women in South Korea

Labor participation and women’s identity

Sung-Nam Cho

The uneven nature of globalization¹ and its unequal impact on developing countries have been extensively analyzed by scholars, but relatively little work has been done on the impact of globalization on marginalized groups in society, and this is especially true of women. This gap in the literature will be addressed in this chapter by exploring the ways in which recent trends in the Korean economy have affected the identity construction process of Korean women. In particular, it underlines how women in Korea have had to negotiate increasingly complex socio-economic problems rising from the country’s rapidly changing economic conditions.

Globalization has stimulated transnational corporations to move their production lines into the developing world, opening up greater employment opportunities for certain groups of women. As a result of the increased demand for labor, women from all age groups have gained increased access to the job market, and female employment in global production lines has become more widespread. Some scholars interpret these macro-trends in the global economy as a sign that women have been beneficiaries of the globalization process. They claim women have enjoyed a general elevation in their socio-economic status, in so far as economic growth is positively associated with expanding opportunities for women. Moreover, this enhanced position of women has been accompanied by new societal standards and ways of measuring women’s contribution to society. Today, women expect that they will continue to achieve greater equality in the years ahead as they obtain more responsible and important positions in the job market. In this sense globalization may facilitate the expansion of a democratic political culture, including greater participation in politics by women.

This rosy view of globalization has been challenged by scholars in the field of gender studies, who have highlighted the inability of capitalism to “develop” gender equality (Chang 1994; Cho 1994). These authors have also questioned the extent to which globalization and its employment patterns have empowered women. Although they admit that there have been some tangible benefits in access to employment, pay and working conditions are often such that working women pay high social, physical and psychological costs for that employment, and therefore the majority of working women have not benefited from globalization. Susan Joekes (1987), for example, highlights the fact that women workers are often concentrated in poorly-paid, labor-intensive “feminized” industries, such as textiles and electronics.

The impact of globalization on women has been complex and contradictory in relation to both their inclusion in and their exclusion from society. The contradictory effects of globalization have been both empowering and disempowering for women (Ward 1990; Afshar 1998). Globalization often contributes to economic growth, but it has also exacerbated existing disparities in wage earnings. In Korea, women’s increased participation in modern industry has resulted in an entrenchment of their subordinate status within the workforce. Labor opportunities for women have increased partly because they have been treated as the cheapest source of labor. Under these conditions, women have worked part-time, as temporary labor, or on out-sourced contracts and piece work. As a result, they have experienced job instability.

As statistics on Korean women have become more readily available in recent years, many scholars have used them to study the relationship between women and development. These studies provide a general overview of changes experienced by Korean women, but they do not provide a sufficient understanding of the relevant factors impacting women’s socio-economic status and quality of life. Although they acknowledge that development policies have helped to change the lives of Korean women, they do not explain the impact of development on qualitative aspects of individual women’s lives. We know from the literature on globalization that increased labor-force participation together with other globalization processes, such as the expansion of education and mass diffusion of information, has stimulated value changes in society. For example, in Korea over the past several decades, many women have formed new collective and individual identities. It is to issues related to globalization, such as the changing character of female participation in the Korean workforce, the impact of the economic crisis of late 1997, and changes in the identity of Korean women during the globalization process, that we now turn.

Increased female labor-force participation

Globalization has touched all aspects of life for women and men in Korea, but it is most visible in the formal industrial sector of the economy. Korean women workers participated in the industrialization process and therefore contributed significantly to the economic modernization program inaugurated by the Park regime. The mobilization of a low-wage and flexible female labor-force was critical to the success of Park’s policy of export-driven industrial growth. As we can see in Table 1.1, over the past four decades Korean women have steadily increased their participation in the labor force, from 38.5 percent of the labor force in 1970 to 41.6 percent in 1980 and 49.5 percent in 1997. The participation rate dropped slightly to 47.0 percent due to the economic crisis Korea experienced in 1998, but rose again to 48.6 percent in 2000 and 49.8 percent in 2004.

Another noticeable structural change in the women’s job market is that more married women—mostly married women with a living spouse, not widowed or divorced—are now part of the labor pool (Tables 1.2 and 1.3). In 1980, the participation rate of married women was 40.0 percent whereas that of unmarried women was 50.8 percent, but by 1990 the former had increased to 47.2 percent while the latter had decreased to 46.5 percent. In 2004, 51.2 percent of married women and 47.8 percent of unmarried women were in the job market (Table 1.2). This trend is particularly evident in the production industry, where the ratio of married female workers to unmarried has widened considerably.

Table 1.1 Labor participation (economically active population) by sex (unit: 000s (%))

New employment possibilities in information technology and computer-related service sectors have played an important role in increasing the participation of married and educated women in the labor force. Table 1.4 shows the ratio of female employees among all employees in information technology and computer-related service jobs. The development of information technology has created new jobs that can be done at home, making it possible for more women to work at home in either a full-time or a part-time capacity. As a consequence, more married and educated women are now employed.

There has also been an increasing willingness on the part of employers to adopt flex-time for employees’ work hours, allowing workers to individualize their work schedules and also companies to hire workers for a specific project on the basis of time allocation. As a result, we see increased participation in the labor market by women, whether they are unmarried or married, educated or under-educated, young or old.

Characteristics of female labor-force participation

As shown above, the number of female employees has been growing in all sectors of industry. However, the characteristics of women’s labor participation in Table 1.5 show that until 1985, female participation in the industrial sector was less than their participation in the primary and tertiary sectors. In 1985, 27.7 percent of women worked in agriculture, forestry and fishing, while 30.0 percent participated in the wholesale, retail, restaurant and hotel trades. Only 23.2 percent of the female workforce was engaged in manufacturing jobs. The occupational composition of women workers became more diverse as Korea became more of an information-oriented society during the era of accelerated segyehwa (globalization). By 2004, only 9.2 percent of employed women were engaged in agriculture, forestry or the fishing sector; this was significantly fewer than the number who worked in the social and personal service sector (26.3 percent) or in the wholesale, retail, restaurant and hotel trades (34.4 percent) (see Table 1.6). While women have enhanced their standing in society by entering the formal labor market, their position has nevertheless remained inferior to that of men. A major issue emerging from this increased participation in the labor force is the “feminization of employment”.

Table 1.2 Economically active population by sex and m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Korea in the process of globalization
• PART I Status politics
• PART II Class politics
• PART III Politics of faiths, ideology and values
• PART IV Societal cohesion