The Risk of Compressed Modernity

In many Asian societies, the process of modernization often took place in a rapid and highly compressed fashion – not over centuries, as had happened in most Western societies, but in several decades. This enabled Asian societies to achieve high levels of economic growth very quickly, but it also harbored unexpected risks and costs that threatened further development. The very mechanisms and strategies that made their explosive modernization possible tended to produce existentially hazardous consequences in virtually all areas of public and private life, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles to sustained advances in the future. Focusing on South Korea and other Asian countries, this book presents a critical account of compressed modernity and its key structural risks. These include endemic political crises, distorted industrial governance, widespread labor displacement, worsening intellectual and cultural dependency, rampant environmental and physical hazards, and even abrupt demographic meltdown. However, these risks and contradictions have also stimulated structural reforms and adaptations, opening up the possibility for the kind of radical change that Ulrich Beck described as “the metamorphosis of the world.”

Preface Introduction: Compressed Modernity and Its Structural Risks Part I   Democracy, Capitalism, Social Class 1. Borrowed Democracy, State-Projective Politics, and Institutional Functional Conflations 2. Normal Corruption: Utilitarian Institutional Dualities and Technocratized Authoritarian (In)justice 3. Class Contradictions of State Capitalist Industrialism: The “Chaebol Republic” 4. The Proletarian Predicament of Developmental Compression: Social Conditions of Flexibly Complex Capitalism Part II   Culture, Family, Life Risk 5. Reflexive Postcoloniality: Intellectual and Cultural Contradictions of Compressed Modernity 6. Compressed Modernity, Gender, and Obfuscated Family Crisis: Individualization without Individualism 7. Complex Risk Society: Risk Components of Compressed Modernity Part III   Prospect 8. A Beckian Metamorphosis? Notes References Index