Korean Workers
Hagen Koo
Forty years of rapid industrialization have transformed millions of South Korean peasants and their sons and daughters into urban factory workers. Hagen Koo explores the experiences of this first generation of industrial workers and describes its struggles to improve working conditions in the factory and to search for justice in society. The working class in South Korea was born in a cultural and political environment extremely hostile to its development, Koo says. Korean workers forged their collective identity much more rapidly, however, than did their counterparts in other newly industrialized countries in East Asia. This book investigates how South Korea's once-docile and submissive workers reinvented themselves so quickly into a class with a distinct identity and consciousness. Based on sources ranging from workers' personal writings to union reports to in-depth interviews, this book is a penetrating analysis of the South Korean working-class experience. Koo reveals how culture and politics simultaneously suppressed and facilitated class formation in South Korea. With chapters exploring the roles of women, students, and church organizations in the struggle, the book reflects Koo's broader interest in the social and cultural dimensions of industrial transformation.
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About Hagen Koo
Reviews for Korean Workers
Sociological Abstracts
With Korean Workers, sociologist Hagen Koo turns to the growth of class consciousness among female and male workers from the 1970s to the 1990s, in the process providing a useful overview of an exceptional period in Korean history from the ground up.
Anthropology of Work Review
This book examines how Korean workers have interpreted their experiences, recognized their common interest, and achieved class consciousness and a collective identity in an environment undergoing rapid social and economic change. The author draws on broad statistical evidence and research data, which he analyzed over a period of ten years. He collected statistical data covering thirty years of industrialization, and also examined interview transcripts, first-generation workers' essays and diaries, union newspapers, and other materials. The resulting detailed analysis offers several rich insights.... Informed by the author's unique perspective and the variety of sources on which he ably draws, Korean Workers brings important theoretical and methodological insights to the field of Korean working-class studies.
Industrial and Labor Relations Review
This book is highly recommended. It is the overdue, first serious, comprehensive, and well-researched study on South Korean working-class formation available to English readers. For those who are interested in Korean political economy, I believe that this book will provide a story that is overlooked by the developmental state literature. For those who are interested in labor studies and industrial sociology, this book shows how theories on class formation can be wonderfully combined to illustrate a particular case.
Labour/Le Travail
This book represents a fascinating history of the growth of class consciousness in one of the developing world's most militant labor movements as it overcame an inhospitable culture and despotic work conditions. Well informed by social science theory, Hagen Koo has written an analytically astute, yet unusually sensitive and sympathetic, account of working-class formation in modem Korea.
Korea Journal
This is a well-written cogently argued alternative picture of Korean society from the perspective of workers who have won little attention thus far. Scholars, students of Korean society, and, indeed, students of comparative labor movements will learn much of Korea in the volume.
Work and Occupations