Cambridge and Medford: Polity, 2022. xiii, 240 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper; US$20.00, ebook. ISBN 9781509552894.
This volume is a culmination of Chang Kyung-Sup’s recent writing on politics and social change in South Korea and provides a broad overview of his wide-ranging and influential work. Topics covered in the volume range widely, including citizenship reconceptualized as “transformative contributory rights,” “complex culturalism” as a strategy for incorporating yet marginalizing migrant groups, reliance on “infrastructural familism” as the basis for both the labour force and capitalist class, and a “developmental liberal” approach to population that has led to the current “reproductive meltdown.” While some of the chapters are adapted from earlier articles, much of the writing is new, and Chang provides explanations throughout of how processes in different substantive social arenas are interrelated. As the quotation marks indicate, Chang is an incessant coiner of compound neologisms, which can be intimidating and occasionally frustrating to a reader who is not already intimately familiar with his work. However, there is sufficient consistency in his coinage conventions that readers are able to visualize a “Chang paradigm” for analyzing South Korea’s contemporary social history.
The overarching concept binding together the various chapters is reflected in the book’s title. Compressed modernity is a “civilizational condition in which economic, political and social and/or cultural change occur in an extremely condensed manner with regard to both time and space, and in which the dynamic coexistence of mutually disparate historical and social elements leads to the construction and reconstruction of a highly complex and fluid social system” (19). As for the difference between “condensation” and “compression,” Chang defines the former as the abridgement of the physical process required to move between geographic location and points in time, and the latter as components of multiple civilizations from different times and locations coexisting in one society. Thus, compressed modernity refers both to the speed and breadth with which social change has occurred in South Korea, and the way in which this change has been shaped by a constant but uneven impingement by outside civilizations.
Chang contrasts South Korea’s compressed modernity with the Western version, arguing that the existence of the West as a dominant power centre and a civilizational model for modernity made South Korea’s transformation a constant struggle between the forced incorporation of Western ideas and practices (much via the conduit of Japanese colonialization) and the defense of traditional Korean civilization, eventually resulting in the formation of hybrid institutions in which certain aspects of tradition and modernity may not only accommodate, but even reinforce one another. Furthermore, due to the diversity of international influences and the way they have been adapted, South Korea has become a “multiplex theatre society” in which different forms of modernity exist simultaneously and contend with one another.
Some of Chang’s general arguments about the South Korean experience would be familiar to those theorists of comparative development, who were some of the first to reject classical social theory’s views of modernity, and who have analyzed non-Western social change via major theoretical approaches such as late development, dependency, and world systems theory, as well as macro concepts such as transitional society, multilinear modernization, uneven development, and breakdown/decay. While the book does briefly discuss dependency theory and makes extensive use of Eisenstadt’s concept of multiple modernities, it is embedded more broadly and extensively in the work of European theorists who focus primarily on Western modernity/postmodernity. This tends to highlight the seeming anomality of the South Korean experience, forcing the author to fill in theoretical lacuna that arise.
Likewise, because the volume’s focus is almost solely on South Korean society, it is difficult to assess the extent to which specific phenomena identified in the substantive chapters are unique to South Korea, shared with other non-Western countries, or at least shared with other East Asian societies that underwent export-oriented rapid economic growth in the latter half of the twentieth century. While it would be unreasonable to expect a full-fledged intersocietal analysis, a greater attempt at comparison with other East Asian societies in particular would seem desirable. Some of the South Korean phenomena that Chang discusses in detail, such as the adaptive cooptation of traditional folk-Confucian familial norms and the contortion of anti-colonial nationalism to serve capitalist development, have also been staple areas of analysis and controversy in the literature on the cultural and political economy of East Asia. With his deep insight into South Korea’s transformation, Chang would no doubt be able to identify commonalities and differences within the region, thus bringing greater clarity to this literature.
Such quibbles aside, this volume is truly impressive, not only in the nuanced and comprehensive examination it provides of South Korea’s experience of modernity, but also in the novel and sometimes counterintuitive insights offered. For instance, in his analysis of the crisis of South Korea’s aging society, Chang discusses how the developmentalist regime’s equating the value of reproduction to its contribution to the labour force has encouraged parents to view children as socioeconomic investments, which in turn has incentivized them to have fewer children as the expense of producing marketable agents of labour has risen in line with South Korea’s move up the production technology hierarchy. Likewise, in examining the large number of immigrant women recruited as brides in the 2000s, he shows how they have been permanently settled into domestic reproductive labour while being forced to performatively manifest a separate communal identity, creating a special social category of “cosmopolitan others,” distinct from ostensibly temporary “foreign” labour and yet not “Korean.” Such nuggets of insight are scattered throughout his book, making it a pleasurable and stimulating read.
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu