The Logic Of Compressed Modernity

Most theories of modernity are based, explicitly or implicitly, on the development of Western societies since the late medieval period, but these theories are of limited value for understanding the development of societies in Asia and other parts of the world, where the process of modernization took place under different circumstances and often in a rapid and highly compressed fashion – not over centuries but in decades. Asian societies have been propelled into modernity too, but theirs is a compressed modernity, which displays very different traits. In this important book, Chang Kyung-Sup provides a systematic account of this compressed modernity and uses it to analyse the extreme social changes, complexities and imbalances found in South Korea and other East Asian societies. While these changes enabled South Korea to modernize very quickly and achieve high levels of economic growth, they also created a society that is haunted by various developmental and civilizational costs, such as endemic generational conflicts, overloaded family responsibilities and exceptionally high suicide rates. As with other societies that have experienced compressed modernity, the South Korean “miracle” is replete with extreme and contradictory social traits. This pioneering work of the nature and consequences of compressed modernity will be of great interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics and development studies, as well as anyone interested in South Korea, Asia and postcolonial societies.

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.

South Korea’s postcolonial history has been replete with dramatic societal transformations through which it has emerged with a fully blown modernity, or compressed modernity. There have arisen the transformation-oriented state, society, and citizenry for which each transformation becomes an ultimate purpose in itself, its processes and means constitute the main sociopolitical order, and the transformation-embedded interests form the core social identity. A distinct mode of citizenship has thereby arisen as transformative contributory rights, namely, effective or legitimate claims to national and social resources, opportunities, and respects that accrue to each citizen’s contributions to the nation’s or society’s collective transformative goals. South Koreans have been exhorted or have exhorted themselves to intensely engage in such collective transformations, so that their citizenship is framed and substantiated by the conditions, processes, and outcomes of such transformative engagements. This book concretely and systematically analyzes how this transformative dynamic has shaped South Koreans’ developmental, social, educational, reproductive, and cultural citizenship.

This book addresses the change of social work in the frame of modernisation. Through Mary Richmond’s classical idea of social work, the book seeks to set current societal trends affecting social work into the context of a long historical line, opening spaces for the new debates within the social work discipline as well as proposing and taking some new directions in the current era of compressed modernity. From the viewpoint of social work, there still is an individual in a situation, however, the situation has profoundly changed during the past hundred years. Divided into seven chapters, topics covered include, firstly, the rethinking of Richmond’s original idea, revisiting the modernisation theories and social transformations as well as discussion on the social work theories and mandates according to the chosen classics. Secondly, the book continues with sketching the pillars of compressed modernity and rethinking the global and local relations. During the era of glocalisation, polycentrism, digitalisation and hybridisation, the previous conceptualisations of social theory have to be reconsidered. Finally, a proposal for glocal social work vision is represented by setting questions which should be taken under scrutinity. Academics, researchers, practising social workers and students of social work, as well as of social policy, administration, social law and other social sciences, will find this book to be an essential text for understanding the current societal changes, trends and tendencies. The book provides a lot of information for policymakers and citizens interested in the background knowledge for the contemporary societal situation.

This book characterizes South Korea’s pre-neoliberal regime of social governance as developmental liberalism and analyzes the turbulent processes and complex outcomes of its neoliberal degeneration since the mid-1990s. Instead of repeating the politically charged critical view on South Korea’s failure in socially inclusionary and sustainable development, the author closely examines the systemic interfaces of the economic, political, and social constituents of its developmental transformation. South Korea has turned and remained developmentally liberal, rather than liberally liberal (like the United States), in its economic and sociopolitical configuration of social security, labor protection, population, education, and so forth. Initially conceived in the late 1980s, ironically along its democratic restoration, and radically accelerated during the national financial crisis in the late 1990s, South Korea’s neoliberal transition has become incomparably volatile and destructive, due crucially to its various distortive effects on the country’s developmental liberal order.

This book explores the Asianization of contemporary Asia, a trend that through neoliberal economic globalism has diluted the political effect of the EuroAmerican-dictated segmentation of Asia and instead facilitated and accelerated socioeconomic exchanges and collaborations among Asian nations themselves. It comprehensively analyzes and interprets Asia’s Asianization in terms of intensification of intra-Asian interactions and flows in industrial, educational, sociopolitical and ecological spheres. Through such explorations, the book successfully reveals that Asia’s Asianization is particularly reflected in the major dimensions of regional industrial integration, transnational class relations, labor market regionalization, international educational mobility, regionalization of media and pop culture, transnational social movements and activisms, regionalized social governance for development cooperation and developmental mobilization of diasporic socioeconomic resources. In particular, as an interdisciplinary study of Asia's industrial, social and cultural integration within and across Asian societies in both outbound and inbound directions, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, development and sociology.

This book considers ethical culture in East Asia, examines the impact it has had on economic and social transformation, and explores what effect it might have on solving current problems. It views the ethical culture of East Asia, that is, the beliefs, values, and practices that define East Asian societies’ conceptions of ethics in everyday life, as different from what pertains in the West, with more emphasis in East Asia on respect for ancestors, concern about propriety of behaviour, and notions of community. The book discusses how these particular East Asian values are being applied, for example, in family businesses, and how they might further be applied to solve current crucial challenges for humanity, such as climate change, ageing, and persistent inequality, challenges that are not being solved by an exclusive focus on economic growth alone. The book includes a consideration of ethical innovation, for example, distinct forms of ecological ethics enshrined in newly emerging economic organizations, such as social entrepreneurship.

This edited volume discusses mediatized religion in Asia, examining the intensity and variety of constructions and processes related to digital media and religion in Asia today. Individual chapters present case studies from various regions and religious traditions in Asia, critically discussing the data collected in light of current mediatization theories. By directing the study to the geographical, cultural and religious contexts specific to Asia, it also provides new material for the theoretical discussion of the pros and cons of the concept mediatization, among other things interrogating whether this concept is useful in non-’Western’ contexts."